Ok, here is a little more info. I am embarrassed to say that as long as I have owned my tractor, I had no idea that there was a manual preheat on the ignition switch. With that being said, I went out just now and tried it. I used the manual preheat and it worked perfectly 10 out of 10 times. So, now we are narrowed down to the auto preheat mode. When I turned the ignition to manual preheat, the relay pulled in every time, and the tractor started instantly. So, wouldn't it be ok to just leave it alone at this point and just always manually preheat??