Will Doing More DE adversely affect my oil drinking 3.2
 

With the recent opportunity to drive Laguna Seca with the Alfa group for only $200 I'm really fired up, but at the same time there is a bit of trepidation there. My car is an 88 carrera and is drinking about 1 quart every 4-500 miles or so. It has been this way for the last year and change and hopefully will continue to stay that this stable, but less than ideal level, until summer time when i can afford to do some real work and hopefully go down the 3.6 route. In the meantime, I have been doing auto-xs with the local PCA chapter. I recently redid the suspension including shocks, bushings and ball joints and I have new pads for any DE I may be doing. I told myself that I wasn't going to participate in any track activities until I got my suspension fully sorted, but now I'm concerned that I will accellerate my valve guide wear by tracking the car. I don't want to sabotage myself, but i would like to get back to doing DEs (it's been over a year since my last one).

your thoughts?

thanks,

db

I'm not sure if it will accellerate your valve wear, but I've noticed when I drive my '86 hard it goes from using a quart every 400 miles to using a quart every 250 miles. If I drive easy it goes back to the 400 miles per quart.

is there any preventative medicine that i can do (aside from an oil change and insuring that the oil level is on) pre or during a DE? i'm thinking that if i keep my eye on things i should be fine, but i'd love to hear the collective "doctors'" opinions.

thanks,

db

I noticed when I drove my 3.2 Carrera hard like on the track the oil consumption was increased by about fivefold. I asked around and this seemed to jibe with other people's experience with the similar car. In your case however you're starting with much higher consumption than I was.

My results agree with Kurt's. I have an `87 Carrera, my valve guide wear and companion oil usage reared it's head ~30K miles, now ~58K. When I was time trialing or DE'ing my oil usage went up and returned to normal 3-400 miles /quart when driving on the street. My car still runs strong and hasn't started fouling plugs yet. And I'm going to keep adding oil it until gets out of hand. I stopped using Mobil-1 15W/50 in favor of Kendall GT-1 20W/50. I might switch to a cheaper but still good quality oil since I don't track it anymore.

I used to own an '89 Carrera. I did not have any evidence of a valve guide problem, even after 146,000 miles on valve adjustments and oil changes alone (engine that is).

However, I noticed that I used a lot of oil at the track. Then someone told me that I should not fill the oil up until the oil level gage stays at the top all the time because that would be overfilled. I believe that the excess burns off as it makes it's way down the overflow.

After that, I ran between the marks on the dip stick but not at the very tippy top with very much less oil burned.

Could this be the problem?