crank, fire, hesitate, crank, fire, run, gas smell

[twowheels]

This only seems to happen when I park in front of my house which is on a slight incline (about 5% grade), but every once in a while I'll start the engine cold and it'll crank, fire, not start, crank some more, finally fire up, and then run just fine, but I'll smell gas. Any idea what's going on?

BTW, I've gotten into the habit of starting the engine by just tapping the key into start and immediately letting go, letting the ECU take over the starting process. I doubt this is related because once the start sequence has taken over it shouldn't matter that I've let go of the key. The big drawback that I can see is that I keep half-starting my Subaru, cranking for not quite enough time and then letting go. :-)