I have been having issues with my 1997 850R when feathering the throttle at freeway speeds. The feeling was if a locking torque converter was disengaging when I would relax my foot on the gas pedal. Since the car doesn't have a torque converter I knew that was not the problem. I was hoping it was not anything with the transmission and performed a few road tests over the next few weeks to determine if I was slipping out of overdrive. I could mimic the problem in third gear though it was not as noticeable. I cleaned my throttle body and made sure my ignition system was functioning properly. I had performed a tune-up the year earlier so I didn't look at any of those components. I opted to replace the throttle position sensor (TPS) thinking that the car was struggling to keep the engine at RPM once I released the gas pedal. I replaced the sensor and the problem was gone. Cheap fix, I like that.

I was also experiencing some really high engine RPM at start-up on occasion. This appears to have fixed that.