Hi all. Please bear with me, I'm new to all this, but need some advice. I recently got the chance of a lifetime - bought myself a '98 XJ8 3.2. Not the best example in the world, but clean and stunning to drive. Had it for 2 months, hasn't missed a beat, especially on a recent 400 mile trip (that's a fair trek for us Brits), arrived back on Thursday. Friday morning I had to move the car about 25 metres to give access to a truck - started and ran fine as usual. Friday afternoon, went to go out in the car, it started, ran for 2-3 seconds and cut out. Since then, it's consistantly refused to start. I had a recovery tech from the RAC come out, he said he couldn't do diagnostics because it was too old. He endlessly wound it over, but to no avail. I went and bought new plugs at his suggestion - still nothing. In the 2 hours he was there, he got it to fire once, for about a second, but didn't actually get it running.
After he left, I repeated his actions, although I like to think I did it slightly more accurately. I took the plugs back out, dried the excess fuel off of them (there was plenty of it), took the boot fuses for the fuel pump out, turned it over for 5 - 6 revs to clear the excess fuel, then replaced the plugs and re-inserted the fuses. Still no good. The fuel pump is definitely running, the injector pump is running, although a friend said that he was surprised to find that the injector pump ran constantly, even without starting the engine. The guy from the RAC did manage to establish that it was sparking OK.
In summary, it's got possibly too much fuel, it's got spark and it ran faultlessly until yesterday - but I'm buggered if it will start today, even when jumped from a high powered diesel. Sadly, I'm neither rich nor an auto-technician. What I am is a massive Jaguar fan, who has finally got his dream car (although I still prefer the Series 3 4.2 or a '67 Mk2 3.8S), who is looking at having to put the car in the worst place possible - EBAY!!! Any ideas.....? Thanks for reading this.

 

Hi guys,

Thanks for the input - tried both things - nothing! Just to make you aware, temperatures here have been very mild for the last few days, so I don't think the cold start is doing anything. Any other ideas......?