oskiller

Recently, but without any consistancy, I've run into a problem starting the car. It started about 4 weeks ago. The first couple of times, I would crank it, and it would try to start, but not turn over. Pull the key, wait a minute and it was fine. Didn't think a whole lot about it.

Recently, I've been doing this - put the key in, turn it to the second position and wait for the check engine light to go out. Starts up fine when that happens. If I wait a few seconds and it doesn't go out, it won't start. It sounds like it is not getting any fuel. When this has happened, the last two times I was able to get it to start by pulling the key, removing the gas cap, putting it back in and turning to second position, then the light would go out and it started. Happened when I left work today. The last time it happened to me prior to this was when I left it in the lot with the windows closed and the whole inside of the car was extremely hot. I left the windows closed again today as well since it looked like rain. It sat in the garage for about 90 minutes when I came home from work, and when I went to start it (position two etc), it fired right up.

Looking around, I see all sorts of things - main relay, fuel pump, ignition control module and so on. Should I look at replacing the main relay first or is there something else I should look for?

ari_one

First thing to do is when you turn your key to the second position you should hear a humm sound, that is your fuel pump priming the fuel line to the correct pressure. If you don't hear it, then there are two possibilities; main relay is bad or fuel pump is bad. Haven't heard of many fuel pumps going so most likely your main relay is going. The relay is know to fail if the temperature is hot. You can replace it or try to fix it yourself by soldering the bad connections, which is why it fails at times.