Hoped it'd last a week before it broke, but ...

[sooty]

.. unfortunately not.

Hope one of you guys can give me a suggestion of a problem that happened with the car whilst on the way to The Romper meet today.

Drove it to the Trafford Centre and it was running fine. On the way from there to The Romper, it felt and sounded as though it was running a cylinder short. I didn't want to stop as I had no idea where I was going so continued at a slow pace.

When I got there, lo and behold the plug lead for no.8 cylinder had come off the plug. I'd hoped that by just popping back on it would cure the problem. It cured the misfire, but there was a ticking coming from that same cylinder. Remove the lead and the ticking went, so its got to be something do with that cylinder. I've had the plug out and cleaned it up in case it had become oiled by having been run for a few miles without igniting, but it looked ok and cleaning has made no difference.

The ticking noise sounds either like an injector or a tappet. When the engine is revved up without any stress, the ticking stops at over 2k rpm, and returns as the engine comes back to tickover. When the engine is under stress, the ticking is there all the time.

I'll be speaking to SFR tomorrow, I hope, but thought I'd run it past you knowlegdeable lot to see if you had any ideas of a simple fix.

SOOTY

[david beer]

Could be a carbon track has been made inside the spark plug shroud, the "spark" will flow down this to the nearest earth point. Swap with another and see if it moves to that one. Only an idea and may be completely going in the wrong direction.