Greetings all,

Ok, I had an odd thing happen on the way home tonight. After coming to a stop at a stop sign in my '08 R56 I attempted to drive away from the intersection as normal only to find that all of the power and acceleration was completely gone. I made sure that my sport button hadn't somehow been bumped off, and moved through various gears to check to see if perhaps the shifter had malfunctioned somehow... It's a manual so I seriously doubted that it was the tranny, otherwise I'd be hearing noises, but one never knows with this car.... At any rate, without that having any affect I recalled reading that the ECU will disable systems if there's a problem, and as if on cue I get this lovely engine warning light suddenly!



I drove the rest of the way home just hoping that something didn't make a loud bang sound and everything stop working. I came to another stop close to the house and decided to turn off the car then turn it back on to see if that fixed it. It fixed the throttle issue but the light is still stuck on.

Now I've been all over the web and haven't been able to find anything that tells me exactly what this symbol means, so I took the car gingerly down to the Autozone close by to have them see if they can get an error code. Once the reader was plugged in and I hit the start button it immediately came up with error code P2188. The Autozone computer network doesn't have the error codes for Minis so the closest thing that came up was a Volkswagen which talked about it being too rich at idle, or a faulty air mass sensor, or a few other things. So now I'm trying to figure this out.

I know I need to replace my valve cover as the integrated valve on the back of the cover has gone bad (the engine whistles like I have a larger turbo mod on the car), so could that be why this happened?

Any information that helps will be greatly appreciated!!

Cheers!

 

I'm pretty sure your valve cover leak is exactly why the check engine light is on. The DME is seeing excess air after the mass air flow sensor. I would replace the valve cover and clear the codes to start.

 

P2188 - "System Too Rich at Idle ".
Not to be confused with P2786 (too lean).

Could be:
1). You have an air leak in the intake hoses after the MAF - check all the clamps and connectors in the plumbing from the air filter box, to turbo, to inter-cooler, to throttle body / intake manifold; or
2). Your MAF is not reading the mixture correctly - carefully clean the MAF sensor.
3). Your injectors are leaking - how many miles on the car?
4). You are running aftermarket tuning software (or some other mods) and its hosing up the fuel mixture - reset to stock and see if the code goes away.

HTH,
a