Hi guys,

I'm hoping someone may be helping to help me as my friend is stumped by my car. We went to see this car, and test drove it a couple of months ago, and all was well. I bought it, and on the way home it was pulling fine (has 150,000 on the clock, and has had a new genuine part turbo on it, engine sounded sweet and well looked after). I had to drop down in speed to 50 on the MW for a section, but when I put my foot down I had nothing. It had dropped into limp mode.

When we got home my friend put it on his diagnostics comp, and it showed a code for the pressure being too high in the turbo. This was the first time the car had had this code according to the comp. We cleared the code, and i took the car out, put it under some pressure and all seemed fine. I then took it on the MW again the next day, and again it seemed fine. A few days later though it dropped me in to limp mode in second gear at a tricky junction. Really not what i needed. I had also noticed that the engine management light was not coming on when I started the car up. The previous owners have played dumb to all of this. Then a couple of days after that i got a whushing noise coming up through the vents every time the turbo tried to kick in, so that told us there was a hole in one of the pipes.

I took it in to a garage, and they taped it for me as a tempory measure while i got the part, and the car was ok. In the mean time friend cleaned the EGR valve which was rather caked too. The drivers side pipe came, and was replaced, only to find that a VW pipe had only been fitted last year! The hole in it is about an inch long. Stared the car up, and it seemed fine, reved it, and it popped the bugga straight off. Friend thought it was the clips, so he did something with those and really swung off them, so it popped the same pipe but on the opposite side off that hadn't been touched in anyway. Friend thought he knew what the problem was so had a look to see it he'd forgotten to put something back, but he hadn't. He again put everything back, reset the car through the comp thinking this may be the problem, and all seemed well on the drive, so i took it around the block. It was fine to start with until i was in third gear going up to forth, and it popped the new pipe again.

In the end they retaped the old pipe, and put that back on to see if that would make any difference because the car ran for a couple of weeks like this before the tape came loose. I drove 7 miles before it forsed the air through the tape on a steep hill. We are thinking that actually the car has ripped a hole in the last pipe instead of blowing it off. There doesn't seem to be a problem with the turbo, and we saw the turbo that was taken off of the car, and there was actually nothing wrong with it at all.

I'm sorry this is so long, but i thought I'd tell you all i know, then you don't have to ask for anything because i was brief.

Thanks in advance

Suzanne