fire bid running ishues

Asked by rtvt93 Jun 19, 2012 at 06:33 PM about the 1995 Pontiac Firebird Formula

Question type: Maintenance & Repair

why dose my Pontiac fire bird run fine minuse a back fire when mashed in nutral and a stuter off the line
till 2 grand and then smoothes up. untill lastnight it started falling on its face and dided now it wont
start up but if i leave the battery un hooked for about 30 min it will start back up and go about a mile  
and die agen any ideas please let me know thanks for reading and your feed back

3 Answers

285

The coil packs are 2 staged. 1 or 2 off the coil packs are bad. Low side is fouling and when you hit higher RPM, the high side takes over, runs fine.

2 people found this helpful.
2,935

First of all, it's a 95 Firebird Formula. They have the LT1 which uses the Optispark distributor, not the coil on wire distribution system. Probably the Optispark died on you. My 95 was doing the same thing. Backfires, stutter off the line, even with the gas floored, bog from around 1500-1800, ran fine over 2k rpm. If you can do autowork yourself, you'll save yourself a lot b/c you have to remove the crank pulley and water pump to swap the opti. Also, buy an AC Delco replacement unit. They're costly, about $500, but they're quality units. Will last 150k+ miles if maintained, cap and rotor replaced, not leaked on, etc.

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