Hi.

New to cars and driving generally so treat me as a novice. Just bought a Focus. Reg date of 2001. However it seems to have an issue when accelarating. There's hardly any power. Although I can get to 70 eventually on the motorway, ususallly when on flat ground. Whenever I try to drive up hill (even a slight incline) there is hardly any power. Cars pass either side of me easily as I trundle along at around 40-50 mph or even less. I move down a gear or 2 but still makes no difference. Then after a few minutes when idling at say some traffic light there's a smell of burning rubber/smell of electrics burning, which takes a while to go away. No warning lights whatsoever. I am almost flooring the gas which surely is wrong. Please help as really annoying me now.

Possibly the handbrake linkage freezing up? I was always advised to leave the car in gear and the handbrake off in very cold weather.

My friend had a very similar problem with his mondeo, turned out to be the coil pack.

Burning smell and excessive heat felt inside the car as unburnt fuel was being burnt in the cat.

He had the cat changed twice as both garages he took it too said they had to change this first and the symptoms were signs of a blocked cat.

I'm assuming you have a petrol model, if so check out the HT circuit, plugs, leads and coil pack, also water around the plugs / ht leads which is a known problem.

Other symptoms were very poor mpg and the cat turning blue where it had got so hot.

Also seem to remember a 'fix' of reducing the spark plug gap to 1mm.

Cheers for the feedback so far. Not sparkie so may have to take it to a garage soon. Able to drive it but obviusly quite slowly. Just worried about the potential costs involved.

I had a similar problem with my old car,Astra, there was hardly any power when accelerating and it was spluttering, it did drive but with minimal power,anyway it turned out to be the fuel pump, i picked one up at the scrappy's for £10 and once i changed it she ran lovely!

One service item that is often overlooked is the 'Fuel Filter' after a few years this can become 'partially blocked' leading to a restriction in the amount of petrol that the fuel pump can deliver to the fuel injection system. I knew of 1 instance where the car (an old Astra GTE) was really not performing well, all usual items had been changed and the final item that Fixed the poor performance was changing the fuel filter. Made the car go like new!