At lakeside raceway today I was under throttle and had a backfire. check engine light come on but car still was running fine. The light went off when i stop and restarted the car. later under throttle backfired again and then ran rough then died. have tried to diagnose the problem. no codes reported by evoscan. distributor was very loose but have tightened that up. ran evoscan and logged trying to start the car and the advance was jumping all over the place. +120 to -20 and everything in between. no sure if this is normal when cranking. Could it be the pickup behind the timing belt, or the distributor? car is tj magna with 6g75 engine fitted.

Crank angle sensor and/or the "plate" it reads... I remember a thread about it while ago... Something in that direction though I think.

Item 16 in this pic is what I'm talking about.

http://i.imgur.com/oI7WW.png

Mmmn;
if the distributor was loose I'd be checking to see what else may be loose ie: crankshaft pully / bolt.

Cheers

yeah im a bit disappointed about the distributor being loose. I don't like having to check other peoples work that i have paid for but i guess these things happen sometimes.

i did a scan today using my proper x-431 diagnostic scanner. it came back with crank angle sensor. strange that evoscan software could not detect the fault