Hi,

I just bought a 1989 190 Evolution 1. Car has done 102,000mls and in outwardly good condition. Unfortunately the car has some sort of idle/running problem. I'm new to the 2.5 16V so would appreciate some pointers on where to start looking.

Symptons:

When I first picked it up, the car tended to stall on braking to make turns, or entering roundabouts, sort of the times you are backing off the accelerator and braking - not carrying a lot of speed just normal driving. The car was also very hard to start without pumping the accelerator and wouldn't hold a cold idle very well.

I mentioned this to a friend and we then found that someone had run a pipe from the top side of the idle control valve to a brass _plumbing_ stopcock and back to the other side of the vacumn multi connector where the original short pipe connected to. The stopcock is adjustable and they had it set to where the car would hold idle.

So I removed this and now the car is hard to start, won't hold a cold idle and has bags of hesitation on acceleration. Once you get the revs up she spins like a top. Plugs are a good colour. The idle seems to fall to 450 threaten to die, recover, run like a dog around 750 sounding like it's running on 2cyls then sometimes it climbs to around 1300rpm. The brakes also appear very hard like there is no or little servo assistence, in fact this changes, sometimes the brakes are soft and servoed then they are hard as a rock.

I guess I have a vacumn leak somewhere, but I gather the idle control valve is toast, and perhaps the positions on the throttle body air flow meter or whatever it is needs to be reset to fix the stalling problem.

I'm pretty handy with mechanics so am not afraid to tinker but some pointers on where to start would be great. Also where can I get all the setting info, sensor testing details etc I see in the archives. I can't get any info on the Evolution/2.5 anywhere ober here. Is that stuff all on the W201 CD?

Cheers,
Neil

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