Dear Ride Drive,

My husband and I own a 1996 4.0 litre Chimaera, which has not given us any serious problems over the past three years, apart from a warped brake disc.  When not in use the car sits in the garage on trickle charge to keep everything nice and ready for when we want to use it.

Recently we wanted to take it out for a spin, but it refused to start.  The battery was fine and full of life, as was the starter motor.  A check of the spark plugs revealed a healthy spark but still no life out of the engine.  There are no warning lights anywhere and the thought was that the cold weather might have go into it.  Having doused everything in WD40 that didn't help either. Thinking it was something electrical my husband checked all the fuses in the box, but they were fine.

Do you have any suggestions as to what might be wrong?  What else can we check?  It breaks my heart having to load the car onto a truck and cart it to the garage!  It does not deserve this.  The 24,000 mile service is due next month and I would much prefer to drive it there and have fixed whatever needs fixing.

Thanks very much for your help,

Sue Marchant

Reply:

Sue,

Thank you for your question,

It is very easy when this type of thing happens to be drawn down the wrong track and waste a lot of time investigating areas that do not necessarily need it.  If you have got a spark at the plugs I would venture to suggest that your problem is not an electrical one - well not to do with ignition anyway.

My money is on fuel supply.  What I would suggest you do is firstly check the fuel pump, as this is an item that fails on a regular basis on the Chimaera and Griffith.  The unit is electrically powered and mounted right in the line of fire of dirt and debris under the car.  What I would do is to disconnect the fuel feed that runs from the tank to the injectors - do it at the engine – and whilst watching the open end get someone to flick on the ignition for a second or two to see if you are getting any fuel pumped through.  If not then concentrate on the pump by checking the terminals to make sure there is contact there and they are clean. The pump also has a relay, which is located close with the fuse box near to the battery at the bottom of the passenger footwell. IF that has become faulty this would also produce the same symptoms.

The pump is bolted to the chassis on the passenger side of the car just ahead of the rear axle and is about the size of a small aerosol can.  If that doesn't work, and you have checked all your fuses, I would go for a new pump anyway because even if it isn't that which is at fault it is good to have a new one as this is an item that fails often as said before.

If the pump isn't at fault, and depending upon how long the car has been standing without use, you could have blocked injectors, but to have 8 block at once would be extraordinarily rare.  Stuck open valves possibly, but again I would have thought it unlikely to have more than one go at a time and if this were to happen you would get fuel ignition in the exhaust.  I know this is stating the obvious, but there is fuel in the tank isn't there?

Try the fuel pump and if no joy come back to me as I can always forward details of the symptoms to Racing Green TVR for their opinion.

Kind regards

Update

Hi Julian,

He's running again!!!  Fortunately, the fuel pump is still with us, but the relay controlling the power to the pump had given up the ghost.  Apparently, the relay can become stuck, especially if the car's not used for a while.  So now life is back on track - only now it's snowing.  Thanks very much for your help.

Throughout it all, I really enjoyed reading your website.  I'm only waiting for better weather to book one of your courses.  I'm the original TVR nut in our house and got my husband interested in the marque, but now that we've got our own I find myself a slightly reluctant driver.  Since I think that the reason for this is that I'm in awe of the Chimeara and its power, I hope that the course will go a way to make me more comfortable driving it.  It sounds very much as if it should.

Kind regards,

Sue Marchant