Hello all,

We have a 1986 2.3litre, fuel injected 740GLE estate (station wagon)UK - spec right hand drive with 136,000 miles on the clock.

We have owned it just over a year the only previous problems being a fuel pump relay requiring replacement at 127,000 miles and a new water pump at 129,000 miles. These replaced the original items and I considered they had given good service to reach that mileage.

Other than that I have replaced the alternater/water pump/power steering drive belts when I replaced the water pump.New plugs and contact breaker points also fitted 2,000 miles ago as per the service schedule.

The problem is this: We had a new starter motor fitted by a garage and
immediately after this the problem began. The car would start fine when it's stone cold but then when hot it would refuse to start when hot - you would have to let it cool right down again (say about 2hours) then it would start fine.

This happened on the first two hot starts immediately after the starter motor replacement and then it became an intermittant fault. The garage claim it cannot be anything they did and this may be so but they showed total disinterest in even trying to diagnose the problem - we left the car with them more than a week and they still didn't check it! They even denied the car had an ECU or sensors of any sort (you get the picture).

When it does this no hot start routine we have checked the sparks are good and also fuel delivery appears ok.

So does anyone have any ideas? I would be really grateful to hear your ideas and suggestions.

I hope I have provided enough information to be going on with.

Many thanks.

Trevor