Cross post from the I-Club.
Just as the car is getting better.
Yesterday was the 3rd event for the region, small course highlighted by a quick slalom off the start, and a LOONG decreasing radius left turn(which is key).
On my first 3 runs, nothing seemed abnormal. It's the first time the car's been under good boost at part throttle, so with my street tires, it was a handful (but fun). On my fourth run, when I let her rip off of the line, out of the corner of my eye I saw smoke. I looked up in the rearview and saw the car puked a huge cloud of light bluish smoke (burning oil). I let up right away, and cruised thru the rest of the course.
I pulled off into the pit area and started poking around under the car. We started it up, and checked out how much smoke was coming out. Under idle, there was very little, but it was there, when I revved, huge clouds came out. First thing I did was take off the filter. Inside of the tube there was a LARGE amount of oil pooled. The tube was coated with a nice thick layer, and there was a fairly large puddle at the bottom of the tube. So, I disconnected the tube from the turbo compressor, and inside the turbo there was a ton of oil as well. Next off was the charge pipe going from the turbo to the intercooler. It had a nice coat, and there was a pool of oil resting on top of the compressor outlet. There was also a pool of oil inside the elbow connecting to the intercooler.
We cleaned the pipes out, connected the filter to the silicone IC hose, and started the car. We gave it a rev, and the turbo shot out a TON of oil. Looked really cool, but it showed how much oil was actually there. We did a quick test with the PCV(?) hose, and the other crankcase hoses to see if there was blowby. There was none. Aside from the oil coming out of the turbo, there was a bunch of smoke still coming from the muffler.
So, off came the intercooler, and, of course, there was a large amount of oil puddled inside the throttle body, not to mention all the oil in the intercooler (the IC was put in my trunk, and when we pulled it out, it had leaked oil all over everything). We started the car with nothing on the TB, and gave it a few revs, still got smoke. So we rigged up an intake with the intake pipe and filter, and let the car idle for a while thinking it may be just a large amount of oil puddled inside of the intake manifold.
When we revved it later, the amount of smoke was MUCH less than before, but we were still confused as to what was going on.
So, after a while, we decided I might as well hook everything back up, and drive the car home, but I should take it easy. By now it was raining, so it was hard to see smoke from behind the car, but I didn't see any while I was driving. Same with this morning, there didn't seem to be any smoke except for your usual cold/wet weather white smoke.
There were a few theories from different autocrossers. Some thought it may be a toasted ring, but there was no blowby, maybe a burnt valve, but who knows, the amount of smoke eventually decreased, by ALOT (down to probably nothing). A Neon owner said at high RPMs sometimes the intake manifold sucks oil thru the PCV on his car, we looked at mine, and the PCV is connected to the intake, AND the intake manifold. He thought it might be that. Another thought was the flat motor was spilling oil into the intake (which was helped by the vacuum the turbo creates), and was being sucked thru the motor. Maybe the long left was helping, and it eventually gathered enough to start smoking pretty heavily. Like I said, going around that turn, I was under full boost, part throttle, and it was a hard left. Another thing that may "backup" that claim was that on my third run, people said the car spit a large amount of blue smoke going around that turn.
Regardless, I'm going to do a compression check, and pray nothing major is wrong. Also, a catch can is my next mod.
