Complex sentence: At 4 am the next morning the party set off again, but the engine continued to struggle; oil ejected from an idle cylinder and the cylinder's lack of compression led Bickerton to suspect broken piston rings to be the root of the problems.
Split into simpler sentences: At 4 am the next morning the party set off again. But the engine continued to struggle; oil ejected from an idle cylinder and the cylinder's lack of compression led Bickerton to suspect broken piston rings to be the root of the problems.