So today while driving to work, some lady too small to see over her steering wheel in her Lincoln pulls out in front of me while I'm doing 50 (speed limit 55) as I was getting ready to pull in to work. I had to slam on my breaks and swerve to miss her; as you know how awful and cheap the cup holder is, this caused my drink to not only spill all over myself, but my center console (and leather seats and steering wheel and floor, but I digress). So I go back home to shower and change, pissed that I have to take my suit to the dry cleaner AGAIN. Go back out to my car... and now the shifter won't move out of park.

I have a pretty good feeling that the little ignition lock spring and latch is what is preventing this from happening. I hope. The CHECK ENGINE light has also come on, so I'm hoping there isn't a short. I pulled the cover off the shifter and used rubbing alcohol to clean down what I could get to, still not working. I'm getting even more suspicious that it's the lock piece preventing it from pulling out of park. I have a feeling that it's probably covered in gooey sugary soda residue as it's 100+ degrees in Texas and the short time it took me to change clothes caused it to dry up and become gooey quickly.

So with a bit of internet search, i find that there SHOULD be a a little pink lever thing on the right side that will override this lock in case of an electrical failure and allow me to shift it out of park. I need to because I need to buy some tools to take the console off so I can get to the transmission lock to clean it off.

But it's not there! In fact it looks nothing like what I've found through my google research (which ends up finding a million FIXYA threads which aren't specific or even for a Crossfire). Here's the pictures of what mine looks like.

And help would be very appreciated on how to get out of this very sticky (!) situation. And a diagram of how to remove all the console pieces would be great as I couldn't find that either.

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