ThermalX

So under hard acceleration (when you just stomp it to the floor, this virtually never occurs when you roll into the throttle) often the engine will cut out or stutter, this is also occastionally acompanied by a flashing check engine light. The light will flash 10 or 15 times or so then go away. The car is an APR chipped (just the regular chip, stage 1?) 2001 1.8T with about 122K on it. It was in for service at 120K, they said the plugs looked fine, but they have about 40K on them so I'm gonna change them anyway. I seem to be hearing it could be coil pack related as well. It's a 2001, so the coil packs aren't the original ones, they were replaced by Audi when all the coil pack issues were going on. That being said this set still has a good 80K+ on them, the bulk of that time the car was chipped as well.

Thanks,
Jamie

KaJoe

Both times my MAF died it displayed the same symptoms as yours minus the flashing check engine light.

ThermalX

Supposedly the flashing check engine light indicates misfires. I can't deny the MAF thought either though, it seems to need to be replaced about once a year or so and it's approaching a year old.

Mr. Mom

When the MA goes it won't idle.

The stuttering and CEL is exatly what happened when my coilpak went

ThermalX

Well after more investigation I'm gonna go with coil pack as well. I took the plastic cover off the engine to change the plugs and discovered that one of the coil packs wasn't even close to being seated correctly, so I pushed it back down. Now my first assumption is that the shop it last went is really gonna hear it about this one. So I go drive the car, it seems better. I come home open the hood an the stupid coil pack has backed up off the plug again. I'm confused at this point. Is the pack incapable of staying on the plug? Or is there a compression leak possibly pushing it out (ie lose plug, or worse, bad threads). Once the head cools enough to investigate I'm going to look into those possibilites.

pinkertonfloyd

They go suddenly, I recommend picking up a set of four (They're not too bad about $30ea), and keep a spare in the trunk (I do). Even the updated ones seem to have issues. (I never had a failure with the recalled ones, only with the replacement ones in fact... weird).

pinkertonfloyd

Really... people are usually too easy when not using a wrench on aluminum heads... get a good torque wrench and torque them down (I believe it's 20lbs, but double-check that).

DanXstatic

Did you determine that it was in fact your coil packs misfiring that was causing this issue? Mine is doing the exact same thing, flashing CEL and all. And I already replaced the MAF sensor.