That lone 1K resistor in the left portion of the circuit, needs to be raised until there's no bleed into the 'high' circuit input. 5v was 'bleeding' into the 'high' LED circuit, so the red lights were on 'dim' as the other lights came on. Those came out to be around 330 ohms in Rich's setup.

FIrst, you have to calculate the resistance needed for each LED, since we're using it with 12v power - there are a bunch of 'LED resistor calculators' available online. Showing my ignorance here (I do know just enough to be dangerous ), how do you figure out what resistance to use? Is it based on different LEDs? If you don't get the resistance right will the lights come on at the wrong time or what? not much is 'easy to get at' on that car!! Problem on Rich's car is that the throttle body is buried underneath a large intake manifold. the fast idle valve has a tunable low and high idle, you set it up to allow more air during cranking and for a brief period while the motor warms up (say, 1200RPM) then set a slow idle (~900rpm) for when the engine is warmed up. That's what we're going to try the next time I am in Kansas City. I think the fix for this is to install a true Fast Idle valve, controlled by the megasquirt. Settles down into a smooth idle after that. I'd describe it exactly like any carburetor, the motor starts immediately if you give it a light tap. given his motor is a pretty hardcore combination, I'm not too surprised it behaves a little like a race motor. The factory IAC never really tracked idle on his combo very well.

Regarding Rich's cold start issue - it's not really an issue starting, the problem is, when cold, you have to press the accellerator 1/8' to allow some air into the engine. I'm having them change the picture above to show a better suggested pullup resistor based on our experience. The shift light is a little more complex than a cooling fan or 2-step mod but it's not too difficult. Then we just got a bunch of clear LEDs from a RadioShack near Rich's house (that was going out of business - 80% off electronics components! I bought 3/4 the store). The 1K resistor in the left half of the above circuit needed, in our case, to be 5.5K.

Sequential led shift light