Dubhghaill

I tried to keep this short, sorry!

My 2005 Mondeo has been running fine despite the fact it has had a broken flywheel for the past 2 years. I don't do much driving so this never really bothered me; I got some rattling in idle and when the turbo kicked in, but otherwise no problems.

I was going on a road trip last week so I decided to finally get this fixed. I needed the car for some chores the day after so they delivered it back and told me that it was not safe to do my road trip because the crankshaft pulley had snapped in two, but it would be OK for a bit of local driving.

The car drove OK, but kept not starting properly and there was some rattling remaining. I found that putting my foot on the accelerator helped it start, but it was 50/50 whether the car would start without it. It seems to almost start and then immediately cut out. When it does start it sounds a little bit rough in idle, but manages to stay running.

I assumed this was the crankshaft pulley, so I asked them to replace that and also the aux belt and tensioner while they were there. They did this and the car was delivered back, this time telling me I should keep the air conditioning off because it is making strange noises (he mentioned a double clutch but it was all a bit over my head).

I was excited to try out my new powerful car but it was still not starting properly and I ran out of time so I went on my road trip anyway.

The motorway driving was a bit of an issue because when I tried to get power at high speeds I kept getting the coil light flashing. Weirdly, the car didn't seem to be in limp mode. There was power loss for a second or two, but then the light would just stay flashing until I stopped the engine and there was no further noticeable loss in power. This might be due to me dropping a gear as soon as this happens to get back up to speed.

It seems to happen every time I put my foot on the accelerator to get torque in high gears the with revs below around 2000. So e.g. going from 60mph to 70mph in 5th or 70mph to 80mph in 6th. Once I learnt how to nurse it the car was basically fine. This meant I did 600 miles in 5th gear at 56mph (I don't think I used 6th gear at all) and I had to do lots of changing down to 4th whenever someone slowed down or there was any kind of incline.

My guess is that this issue was probably here before, but the slipping clutch was able to mask it. This might be completely wrong because I know nothing about cars.

I'm starting to get worried that I'm falling into a money pit. Has anyone seen these issues? Hopefully it's not too expensive to fix!