Diesel runaway experience

[438brad]

Well I experienced my first diesel runaway yesterday. I was actually driving a friends poorly Citroen C4 2.0 HDi VTS which I have been trying to get sorted out for him (anti pollution warnings, engine management light on and bad turbo lag) when I entered a local bypass and started accelerating up the hill. 2nd gear, no power for a few seconds then all hell broke loose! Engine revved up to maximum revs, loads and loads of blue oil smoke out the back and from under the bonnet, so I instinctively turned the key to the off position but that did nothing, so I remembered what I'd read in car mechanics monthly only a month or two back and stuck it in 5th and dropped the clutch. That worked, it stalled and I coasted to a halt (although with no hard shoulder I was stuck in the inside lane with a barrier on my left). After a quick look in my mirror and watching a couple of cars swerve round me at the last second I decided I had to try to limp it the few hundred yards to the exit slip. It started up and ran badly and as soon as I got to about 15mph in second gear it did it all again! I stalled it again the same way and then just limped off in 1st gear at walking speed.

An incredibly unpleasant and rather frightening experience when you've never known anything like it before, but I thought I'd share it as it might help someone else who reads this to know what to do if it ever happens to them. Because I reacted so quickly (it probably only revved at max for about 5 seconds), on first appraisal by a mechanic he reckons the engine may have been saved although the turbo is shot. The car would most likely have set on fire if it had been left to run on its own engine oil at maximum revs and would at least have resulted in catastrophic engine failure, e.g. a rod through the block.