P38 misfiring - Help!

Hi all,

Had my 97 P38 4.6 for about a month now and all been good until now

The battery went flat a few days ago so charged it up, put it back on and went through the whole reset procedure started her up and drove away, after about 10 miles the car started missing, felt like it was running on 3 cylinders! I stopped and it stalled and would not turn over!

AA recovered on a flat bed and took me home, had a look today and noticed one of the EMS fuses under the bonnet had blown so I replaced it and it would start again but still running only running on a few cylinders, turned the ignition off and tried to restart but the ems fuse had blown again replaced, pulled the plugs, cleaned them, put them back ensuring all leads were on tight but its still missing.
Have tried pulling the MAF lead off but makes no difference.

Can anyone help please?? Thanks in advance

You'll have to be more specific in which fuse keeps blowing.

Thanks for the quick reply
Its fuse no26 20A engine management system.

F26 also feeds the oxygen sensors and the Ignition coils. The fact that your engine does start would say your ECU is OK. The biggest suspect has to be the ign coil pack. This would give the symptoms you're getting of only running on 3 or 4 if a couple of the coils were breaking down (There are 4 coils each feeding two plugs - one plug fires at the normal time and the other fires but doesn't do anything until the next time when it fires at the correct time and the other does nothing. They call it the wasted spark technique).
I'm 99.999% sure that's where your problem is.

Thanks for the advise Derek, will have a look at the coil packs tommorrow.
Are these easy to get to? Any way of telling if one is duff?

Thanks again!!

A bit fiddly to get to as they're at the back of the engine on the left hand side (nearside). They're all mounted together as one assembly. You can't buy individual ones but if you really wanted to see which one was breaking down, pull the plug leads off one by one with an old plug on the end touching earth and see which leads are firing when you crank it over.