Help with diagnose clutch/transmission problem.

I have a 2002 wrx with 155,000 (ish) miles. I had to rebuild the transmission about 80k miles ago after a long day of abuse at a drag strip (May/June 2006), and aprox a year after that, a new clutch (forgot the miles, but it was before 100k).

So just recently one morning the clutch pedal stopped coming back out all the way. It will stop to where the clutch starts to engage. It also feels wayyyyy shorter then before. It feels like less than an inch and a half of engagement area. Sometimes, the pedal will pop all the way out if I hit a light bump.

Since this happened, the transmission feels a lot less stable. It feels like it's grinding at higher rpm's / speed. Even more recently, about a week after this started happening, it's been getting harder and harder to get it out of gear in the morning. Until the car heats up, shifting feels near damn impossible.

I hope it's not the transmission and just a clutch issue at most. My brother works at a Nissan dealership and took the car in so he can have it looked at, but any help or thoughts from you all would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, and I'll come back and let you know what the dealership tells me, and take in everybody's advice.

 

^^ I'm with Matt on this. First try the slave cylinder, its a quick first thing to replace and its fairly cheap, before going into the clutch and pulling transmission. I have the same thing going on in my truck turned out the pressure plate and throwout bearing wore into each other. Good luck with getting it fixed.

 

Thanks for the input. According to the tech at my brother's dealership, I need a new master cylinder. After draining/flushing and replacing the transmission fluid, it's been fixed for now. They said there was also air in my lines.

Will look into slave cylinder first before checking out the master.