This is for a friend of mine, he has a smurf blue 88 GTA 305 TPI auto that was given to him, it runs like a turd (hence the name) and he was too lazy to register here.

Anyhow, he got it from a girlfriend of his, she says it was running fine when parked she just bought a newer car. Well we tried to get it running only to find the fuel pump not working. We got the car to his place, replaced the fuel pump and got it running but it runs like ****. It idles rough, smells of raw fuel out the exhaust, backfires out of the intake when revving, way down on power etc.

We've done basic checks, the fuel pressure is fine, ignition seems ok etc. I ran my other friends snap-on Modis on it and got a couple codes, I can't remember them all but I remember MAF burn off was one of them. The weird thing is the car runs better with the MAF unplugged than it does plugged in generally. I watched the raw data from the MODIS and the MAF readings seemed to correspond properly to higher air-flow (revving) etc, although I don't know what general MAF values we should see for idle etc.

The fans don't come on once it gets warm, I believe the MODIS showed the ECM as outputting the fan on at all times (even when it was cold). The weird thing is you turn the key on sometimes before you start it and the fans run, so they're hooked up right and functioning.

I should note that it varies every time we start the damn thing up, sometimes it runs worse than others. One time we actually had it running for a decent amount of time and it ran almost fine except for the cooling fan not coming on. Being intermittant it sorta leads me to ECM.

Do these cars have issues with ECM caps going bad like some of the early 90s cars?