On Friday last I found the Corvette C4 that I look after outside the workshop with a flat battery and a non start fault. The owner told me that it died on the road and that when the recovery guy was squirting starter fluid into the throttle bodies there was no fuel from the injectors and the engine did not even cough so no spark either. I'd recently replaced the fuel pump as there was a spare with the car, it had a tendency the not fire up unless it had cooled down after a run out and one time a recovery guy whacked the fuel tank and as it fired an assumption had been made. I cleaned the fuel pump relay contacts and that got fuel pressure but there was still no spark or squirt. Following the flowchart in the factory manual got me to check for a pulse at the injectors, there was none, and then to look for an AC reference signal from the distributor to the ECM, there was none of that either. Having checked that the circuit between these 2 points was good I made a quick call the John Woolfe Racing down in Bedford and the next morning I had the required part in my hand, a new Ignition Control Module, the bit that sits in the distributor and manages the coil pickup signal and spark timing. Once it was all back together it fired right up. I'm hoping this will also cure the intermittent starting problem, something tells me it's related. Whilst it was in I've also fixed a dodgy wire in the headlamp motor circuit, adjusted the driver's door window and deleted the air pump by removing the pulley and fitting a shorter belt.
