Thread: 2002 Grand Prix GT gas smell under hood and stuttering on start Idle at times

Hello,

I bought my wife a 2002 Grand Prix GT as I have a 97 and love these Pontiacs. Lately it has an issue where sometimes, not all the time it will start or not wanna start until you crank it a while like its not getting fuel. It will then have a gas smell under the hood. I thought maybe there was a leak on one of the gas lines but I put some paper towels under any point like the fuel rail connections and cranked it to see if I could find any gas on the cloth and none was found. This is an issue on my 97 that I had fixed before.

I tried again and it started like nothing happened and the issue wasn't present. I thought maybe was bad gas so I filled up with about 4 gallons of a good gas premium to see if that helped. Drove it to work and back no real issues besides the starting and gas smell.

So could a bad gas cap do that? Maybe a fuel pump issue but seems like if that was it it would cut out at other times as well and well the gas smell seems like it wouldn't be there if it was flowing.

Has good power so doubtful is a bad coil or something like that but I know one not firing all the time can cause that gas smell since it may be throwing it down the exhaust instead of burning and at one point did see some white smoke like it did burn up some gas that didnt get ignited.

Any ideas here? I didn't check the coils yet so may do that tonight in the dark to make sure spark is jumping from the coil to the boot and snugged all the plug wires at the plugs themselves.

Maybe MAF, or dirty air filter?

Also no error codes or SES is on that I can tell though ill check tonight to see if there is some code even though I see no SES

I have been looking up Fuel Pump Relay stuff but seems the test to move the pin over is for supercharged engines only. Though does that work on a NA 3800 to test that resistor? Is the relay itself bad you think or the resistor that is tied to it to go in the lower speed mode?

That fixed the issue so thanks very much for the heads up on the Fuel Pressure Regulator. I was confused on where this actually was since the pictures when I search for it look bigger than it really is. But got a new one in there and seems to be working fine now.