Fast idle

[colorpro]

For as long as I've had a 1979 Fiat Spider 2000, the hazard light switch needed to be on for the car to run. Everywhere, it seemed that I would hear that it must be a bad ground.

Now I need to sell the car and when attempting to find the bad ground to fix it, I noticed a brown with blue stripped wire that was disconnected, laying on the left side of the engine compartment. I thought, this must be the problem since it appeared to go to the grounding post that was just cleaned.

When I went to start the car, the brown and blue wire started smoking. I stopped and unplugged it, tried to start it again, but no go. I found the ignition coil was fried, bought a new coil and when installing it, noticed that a ground wire from the electronic points in the distributor was not plugged in. I looked up several wire diagrams and found that it should be plugged. This fixed the problem with the hazard lights and the battery isn't being drained any longer.

My only problem now is that the idle is at 3k rpm and can't adjust the throttle any lower without the screw falling out, cold or warm.

The car is great condition and will get more for the asking price if it is functioning correctly. Any suggestions for additional troubleshooting would be much appreciated.

-bb

[digitech]

Can you tell us if the engine is original or has it been modified? By that, I mean is all the emissions equipment present and hooked up - it makes a big difference in trying to help you troubleshoot this issue.

[colorpro]

Yes, everything is original. The electronic distributor looks like the only modification that I can tell.