I thought it was the distributor cap but it looks like something else.
It will crank up and run great for a while and then it will go crazy, the speedometer goes nuts, the anti-lock brake light comes on, and it will run in lunges and then seems like it has died but if I take it out of drive into neutral it's still running and runs Ok, put it back into drive it lunges for a while and repeats the same deal. Seems like the gear shifting affects the problem. If you put it in 1st gear , it seems to still change gears and will lunge so bad that the drive shaft sounds like it's coming apart. A mechanic locally put in a speed sensor in the transmission, ran Ok for a while and then started the same problem again.

There isn't an engine service light or code at all.

What could cause this?