I owned at least 14 cars with distributor caps and at one time maintained cars of my 4 kids and inlaws. A few were bought new, I have never seen a gasket where the cap meets the distributor. If a cap showed no carbon tracking but was oily inside I would wash it with detergent inside and out and let it dry in the sun.
Here’s my distributor on my Celica’s 20’r. You can see the gasket, but it’s so thin and small that I doubt it would be the end of the world if it wasn’t there.
I remember those gaskets… Cars from Japan seemed to favor them. I’ve also seen them without…like @oldtimer-11 mentions.
So you are both correct.
Is it just the picture or is the bottom of your distributor full of a bunch of crud? It looks almost fluffy from here. You could remove the distributor and disassemble and clean it if this is the case… Might help the Hall effect sensor on that electronic module in the distributor base pickup the rotor slots better if it is indeed as dirty as it looks. If anything is blocking that sensor you can definitely have problems that will seem spark related.
Going back over this thread, I noticed that you mentioned not being able to go over 4K rpm. The first time I read it, I interpreted that as part of the problem with water, but if it is a separate issue, then I suggest that you get a new or reman distributor and not bother with piecemealing this.
Those distributors had an issue with main shaft wobble. There is no shaft bushing, the shaft just goes through a machined part of the case. It wears out and the shaft begins to wobble. You could disassemble and remove the shaft, have the case knurled and remachined, but I’m afraid that might cost more than a reman.
Quick check is to align the “ignitor” with one of the blades on the shaft. There should be 0.010" gap between them. With the brass feeler in place, push against the shaft away from the ignitor and see if the gap grows. If it grows another 0.005", that is your problem.
Edit: I found this once when the problem went from intermittent to total fail, the gap had grown by 0.007" for a total gap of 0.017.
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I can hear what @keith is saying. If this is an 87’ it should be fuel injected… What may be interpreted here as no spark…could actually be no fuel injector pulse. Need to do some proving out here to know what the problem truly is…
The distributor plays a part in fueling as well as spark…
There is also the injector resistors…and the injector relay to consider. You need to devise a test to suss out what component of combustion you are losing here when she shuts down. To say it shuts down is not enough to diagnose with any sanity from a forum like this