Blown stop light bulbs cause VSC/TRC to illuminate.

[Konrad C]

I help my mate Waqar sort out a problem with his Mk2 1.8 estate. The TRC and VSC lights were coming on and occasionally going off intermittently, eventually staying permanently on.  He sent me a message with this problem and I suspected the stop light bulbs were blown. I did a quick check with this forum which seemed to confirm my suspicion. I packed spare bulbs with tools and my Launch OBD scanner.

When I got there, I made Waqar press the brake pedal, and yes, the bulbs had blown. Only the high level LED light was working. What should have been an easy bulb change became a faff removing both clusters. 

We had to remove some of the trim to access one of the nuts.

When the bulbs were examined, one filament blew as normal,

whilst the other seemed to melt .

The melted bulb caused the intermittent TRC/VSC fault.

After reassembling the lights and testing the lights, we plugged in the Launch scanner and cleared the codes from the memory. All done.