Thank you for all the information. Very much appreciated.
so, I was able to take out all the newly inserted spark plugs and noticed the first one has a lot of black soot on the first cylinder plug (pardon my lingo as I have minimum knowledge of cars). I had replaced all the 4 spark plugs but looks like the first one is taking a beating compared to the others with just under 40 miles after replacing them.
Any ideas what would cause this ? The error code still is p0301 after swapping the ignition coils.