[JSH]

Originally Posted by N Camarolina

Was at VIR this past weekend, and the lapping was cut short mid day Saturday by engine failure. Had it towed on Chevy's dime 1.5 hrs to a dealer near my house. Waiting to hear on the diagnosis. Would love to hear your thoughts on my question at the bottom of the message regarding rebuild vs replacement (if I have any say in the matter, as this is a warrantee repair).

Some more details on what happened:

On the final lap, the 1st sign of trouble was accelerating out of T1, it felt like traction control was intervening to cut power slightly. Kind of perplexing, but thought it was a fluke. Turns 3 through 6 went as normal. But when I went to WOT exiting snake to head toward the bridge, I only received about 20% power. Realizing there was a major problem, I closed the throttle and coasted to a place to safely pull off the track and shut it down. By this time, "low oil pressure" warning was displayed in DIC. Right before I shut it down, engine sounded bad and was making gurgling, knocking sounds.

A review of the PDR data shows that oil temp started slowly climbing above "track normal" 1.5 minutes prior, 3/4 way through previous lap. By the start of my final lap at T1, it had reached 300F and oil pressure was slowly dropping, now in the 40s rather than 50s. By the time engine power was reduced to 20%, oil pressure was just dropping below 30. In the 5 seconds that it took to safely slow down and pull off the track at engine idle, the pressure had dropped to 0.

Upon looking under the hood, no oil was lost (still at 3/4 mark on the dip stick) and no engine parts were ejected through the block. Trailing car video shows nothing unusual exited the tailpipes.

I'm no engine expert, but I'm guessing the cause of failure is likely an oil pump failure. My concern is premature wear of engine parts due to lack of circulating oil and possible higher oil temps. If there was indeed a pump failure, then oil wouldn't be circulating, which means that the oil temp probe (it's somewhere down low near the oil filter right?) reading 300F was probably underestimating the true temp in the upper part of the engine. And if that's the case, how much accelerated wear and tear might have been done to engine components that haven't already broken. Not sure how the water coolant figures into the mix, it remained at 212F throughout the session, including during the engine failure.

If Chevy tells me that oil pump failure is to blame and only the upper part of the engine was damaged and they want to rebuild it, should I try to insist that they replace the whole engine instead?

Take the engine apart and see what happened.