Hello all,
I have a 99 A4 1.8TQ. It is manual and runs and drives great. I have no check engine light currently. I do have the abs light and air bag light on though. The car is pretty much stock with the exception of pillar mounted boost and oil pressure gauges, cone filter, and forge splitr. Every once in a great while when i go to start the car it doesn't want to start. The engine turns over normally (not slowly) but no start up. I usually end up pumping the gas to no avail. Then i take the key out and retry after a few minutes i can always get it to restart. Battery is showing 13.6v with my dmm. The car only does this rarley and does not seem to be related to the weather. It also does not matter how long the car has been sitting. Yesterday i left my house (it started fine) went to my daughters school which is about a 15 minute drive. Sat in the car with it running another 5 minutes. Then i turned the car off and went inside for no more that 10 minutes. I came back to the car with my daughter and it took me about 4 min of trying to turn it over to get it to finally go. When it did turn over it ran fine idled fine and showed no problems (no cel) I do get the CEL at KOEO so i know the light works. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I am at school right now so i will be looking at it when i get home. I have owned the car for around 4 moths and it has done this maybe 5 times.
thanks
scott

 

There could be so many different things that could cause a problem like this. It's really hard to say where to start looking. First off, start looking for the obvious, like broken hoses, lines, ect. then go from there. My guess would be either the fuel pump isn't pumping, the fuel filter is clogged, or your spark plugs aren't sparking.

Even though you don't have a CEL on, you can still try to scan for codes. Sometimes a "soft" code can be stored in the brains without actually tripping the CEL. It might give you a starting point.