At a rallyx event in June (maybe July?), the car suffered a couple catastrophic failures, one of which was a no-start condition in the afternoon. Initially, I thought the problem was the ignition module, however, a closer inspection back in the garage showed that I was getting spark, but there was no fuel. After some hunting around, I discovered that the injector driver on my Megasquirt 2.2 board was known to be somewhat weak, and I found a replacement for the deprecated replacement for the original. After ordering it from Digikey for a couple bucks and soldering it in, the cart started running again.
At another event in August (or September?), the car suffered from another no-start condition, but there was definitely gas getting to the cylinders this time. I assumed that I had fried another ignition module, so I towed it back home. I lost the Glenn’s Garage ignition module that I had built (again!), so I sort of sat on the car for a while, since there weren’t any event scheduled again until November. On a lark, when I needed the trailer for the $2011 Challenge, I tried starting the Neon, and it fired right up. My guess is that the module had simply overheated and gone into a thermal shutdown mode.
After hunting around for a bit, I tripped across that module again, and went ahead and put it in a project box and got it ready to install. I also decided that replacing the wiring for Megasquirt would help out, from a troubleshooting and reliability perspective, so I ordered several different colors of wire and got to ripping out all the old wiring and putting new stuff in. I was actually able to cut each wire to exact fit, and use plenty of heat shrink wrap to ensure that all the connections are secure and the wire runs are out of the way.
Initially, the car would not start with the new ignition module, even after I re-soldered the Megasquirt board for the VB921s (I’m not using VB921s, but the Fairchild transistors that I have are a direct fit) instead of the 420a Power Transistor Module. Turns out that the heatsink thermal paste that I had was electrically conductive, so after I wiped off all that grease with carb cleaner, it stopped grounding out and the car started right up.
I played with the dwell settings a bit, and have it where the idle is smoother than it had been previously, and overall, things seem to be running much better now.