My 10 year old Litchfield Forester STi needs a bit of maintenance to sort a minor oil leak but other than that has been behaving well for the past year with regular oil top ups.
This week on the drive home I first noticed there was no heating in the car, and then the engine temperature started to spike up towards the red line. So I pulled over, let the engine cool and did some basic checks.
- top of the radiator was cool
- oil was low, so I topped it up as normal
- water level in radiator overflow bottle was fine
- carefully opening the radiator cap, no steam came out
Continued on slowly but was only getting about 400 yards before the temperature would get towards the red line again. Very occasionally I'd get a burst of warm air through the heating in the car, but then it would run cold again. Running the interior heating fans did help to cool the car faster, but again, on checking the radiator and all exposed bits of the engine block, nothing felt very hot.