Thanks John!

I'll support John in what he has said.

The offical 72,000 mile service time, including cam belt, with engine
removal is 15 hours.  15 hours at £55+vat is £969.  By no menas cheap.  If
one is going down the main delear route then try to get 'fixed price' plus
extra parts for cam belt change and other drive belts.  To expand, because
the belt is such a pig to change due to lack of access not only should the
belt and tension pulley be changed one should also change all drive belts
and other static belt stretcher pulleys at the same time.  Sort of an
insurance policy because many of these are plastic and there are reports of
some cracking and failing resulting in all sorts of damage.    The
arguements about possible overkill will always be biased :-)

I guess the overall point about the cam belt change is to understand what is
involved and thus be aware so you can extract the best and cheapest solution
for your chosen route.  Regardless of the belt change cost, where can you
buy a beautiful Italian sports cars with looks and Ferarri performance for
such a modest cost in comparison!

Something to REALLY watch out for on the Coupe 20V is the Poly-V auxilary
drive belt.  On the Coupe 20V this is a double sided Poly-V which goes from
the crank and round the houses to drive the alternator, power steering pump
and aircon compressor.  Being double sided and the Vs in line with each
other means the central mass/section of the belt is very thin.  Once the
belt begins to wear it happens quickly and belt failure occurs with long
sections of the Poly-V tearing off like the edge of a carpet fray/run.  This
3 foot plus long piece of rubber string then gets dragged into the crank
pulley, gets wound up behind the pulley, causing the the cam belt timing to
be thrown out as the cam belt rides over the now ingested poly-V belt
fragments.  Fairly soon after this happens, with luck, the engine management
light will come on as the ecu detects that the main crank is out of phase
with the cam shaft phase sensor.   I say with luck because if the timing
throw is not massive or too rapid one can stop the engine before the pistons
hit the valves.  Once the light is on the engine will not restart but would
continue to run in limp home mode (which I don't recommend).

So, please keep a close eye on a regular basis on the auxilary belt.  Could
save you a premature cam belt change and/or engine damage.

I hate Poly_V belts, especially double sided ones.  When our aux belt
started to fail my wife who was driving spotted the light come on and
responded accordingly.  Cost us £850 as an emergeny repair at the Fait
dealer we were recovered to by the RAC.

The RAC guy said that they are now seeing quit a number of poly-v aux belts
(even on new Mercs and BMWs etc) failures that are causing very expenensive
engine damage.  So much for technolgy progress :-) ....

Nick /////