Some help!!! I have a octavia vrs 1.8 petrol on an 03 plate i recently had a blocked oil strainer which I had replaced and a new oil pump put in at the same time after that was done the car was fine for over a month then every now and then I would be driving along and as soon as I hit a dual carriageway or motorway and got above 50mph I have a cloud of black smoke coming out the back of the exhaust I slow down and it stops and then I drive home normally then I take it out again and the same thing happens any ideas please anyone????

Black is normally unburnt fuel.

Can't tell you much more than that sorry.

Do you know anyone with a fault scanner ??

Is that the one you plug into the ecu? I have ordered a universal one just waiting for it to arrive

Code reader may not help you as there's a lot of VAG codes that they don't recognise. Have a look in the VCDS section of the forum there's bound to be someone near you who can help.

If you have a laptop buy an ebay OBDII cable, & download VCDS Lite from the rosstech site it's way more useful than a code reader.

As David 8 says, black is normally unburnt fuel. I'd scan with a decent VCDS, not a code reader, paying particular attention to coilpacks and injector duty cycles. I've a feeling you may find a coilpack is going down, you have a bad spark plug, or one injector is running a higher duty cycle than the others.

It's worth calling your local Skoda dealer to see if your car is covered by the VAG coilpack recall. Most mk1 VRS's are so you could get a new set of coilpacks supplied & fitted free of charge.

My code reader turned up this morning no fault codes showing I phoned my local skoda dealer and I asked about the recall and the only reply to that I got was book it in for a diagnostics and we can take a look at it! Any other ideas people?

Unfortunetely a code reader isn't doing to give you a definitive answer, as I explained earlier.

Some VAG dealers seem to be unaware of the coil pack recall so you may need to push them a bit.