I recently purchased a 51 plate 1.4 16V petrol Fabia, only 33,000 miles on it. I am still getting used to it. I've done about 500 miles in it so far and I've not had any engine worries until now. Normally the revs sit at about 3,200 rpm in 5th to do 65 mph, but a couple of times tonight on the motorway, the revs suddenly dropped to about 1000 rpm before returning to normal - all in about 1 second. However the drop in revs coincided with a retardation similar to applying the brakes. The engine behaved fine in between and I didn't see an ECU warning light or anything else to suggest there was a problem - any ideas anyone?

Possibly related, but I did notice a couple of times when I pulled up at a junction and dropped the clutch, the tickover revs would wander erraticaly between 500 - 1500 rpm. If I briefly touched the accelerator, the revs settled back to a normal idle of about 900 rpm. This doesn't happen very often.

Cheers for any advice.

We had a similar issue with our Lupo with the same engine: a throttle alignment seems to have cured it, though you might want to clean the throttle body too.

Throttle Body Alignment (TBA) - Ross-Tech Wiki

Funnily enough? The car was booked in with the Skoda dealer today anyway to get the anti-roll bar fixed (yet another VAG design flaw) so I've asked the garage to clean the throttle body and check the throttle alignment and crankcase sensor whilst they are at it. Can report back on how I get on.

Cheers.

The Skoda dealer did a computer check and didn't find any problems so they didn't pursue this further, even though I'd asked them to clean the throttle body. I've a wee generic local garage who could do something like a throttle body clean, but after doing this, would you need to do a throttle body alignment/computer check? I'm just wondering how much work can be done these by back street garages and how much you have to rely on the main dealers with all the appropriate computer equipment.

The alignment needs to be done if the body is disturbed. You need VAG-COM or the dealer's computer to perform it, but it only takes a few minutes.

The Lupo didn't have any stored fault codes either, but the alignment improved it no end.