Turbo fuel pipe clips

Symptoms

• Smell of petrol in the cabin while driving. In the original report this was the only warning, and the fuel was already spraying.
• Clips with broken "branches", cable ties floating loose or worn through where they pass through the bracket

If you can smell fuel, stop and look straight away. Don't keep driving.

Check (1 minute)

Open the engine lid and find the coolant tank. The two fuel pipes run along its bracket. Check that:

• both pipes are held firmly against the bracket and can't move
• the clips are intact, with their branches still there
• the cable ties aren't worn where they go through the bracket
• the pipe connectors are fully seated, with no fuel smell or wet marks

Several owners who checked found one clip already out and the other "clinging on".

If you're not sure what you're looking for: follow the fuel lines back from the cylinder head and check they're secured sensibly, particularly at the join to the hard pipes. It takes about a minute. The original photos in the thread no longer work (the image host broke them), so there's no picture to point to yet.

The fix

The permanent fix replaces the clips with something that can't perish:

1. Remove the old clips and ties.
2. Bolt a self-adhesive cable tie mount through each bracket hole with a short bolt and nyloc nut (don't rely on the adhesive alone).
3. Cable-tie each fuel pipe firmly to its mount, keeping the pipe straight and fully pushed into its connector.
4. Start the engine and check for leaks and smell.

Adding an extra cable tie around each original clip will do as a quick interim fix, but it's not a permanent one.

Does it affect NA cars?

The thread's answer is that it mainly affects Turbos. One NA owner who asked, because his car had smelled of petrol a couple of times, looked at his engine afterwards. He found the fuel lines on the opposite side of the engine from the Turbo's, and they looked fine. That's one owner's look, not proof that NA cars can't have the problem. If an NA car smells of petrol, still find the cause.

Why this keeps coming up

The thread has been bumped by owners again and again (in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2021) as a reminder to new owners, and it's on the new-owner checklist. In 2018 another Turbo owner said he didn't know how a leak of this kind hadn't caught fire, and suggested the exhaust being on the other side of the engine on a Turbo may be the reason. Don't rely on that. Fuel in a hot engine bay is a fire risk.