So I'm driving down a side street a few weeks ago and all of a sudden I heard a loud BANG! under the car, I obviously hit something on the street but looking in the rear view mirror I didn't see anything obvious. Some guy that was walking down the sidewalk jumped about a foot in the air when I hit whatever I hit, that's how loud it was. Now, in hindsight I guess I should have pulled over right away and checked out the car, but I didn't think of it at the time and everything seemed all right, so I kept driving. A few blocks down the road, my oil light starts flashing and I pulled over right away and shut off the motor. I got out and looked under the front of the car to see a lot of oil draining out of the bottom of the car! I left the car there and got a ride home.

I called and had the car towed to a friend's garage the next day and he took a look and told me that the oil pan had a nice size hole in it and that one of the motor mounts was broken. Here's one part that annoys me, but I guess its part of owning an Audi, the oil pan is made of cast aluminum, I suppose to save weight, but you can apparently either get another aluminum one or substitute the steel pan they use on the 1.8 VW's. If I had been running with the cheaper steel pan in the first place, there probably wouldn't have been a hole in the pan! (now really, how much weight does that aluminum pan save and its not like I'm driving a Ferrari F430 Scuderia where saving a few pounds wherever possible makes it into the perfect race car or something, come on its a 4 cylinder Audi that gets its doors blown off by old ladies in V6 Accords who don't even know they are racing!) He picked up a pan and fired up the motor (after filling it with the expensive full syn oil!) and told me that there was definitely internal motor damage from being run while very low on oil. Time for a new motor.

So, I called my ins co and told them about the problem, glad I have the full coverage on this car. They sent someone to check it out and cut me a check for a new (used) motor. The garage is fixing it right now, he's a friend of mine and he found a good deal on a used motor with 95,000 on it (my car just turned 120,000 miles) that he said looks to be in great shape. The place he got it from he has been dealing with for over 20 years and it supposedly came from the owner's brother's A4, which had been dealer maintained all its life until being rear ended recently, putting an end to its life. The motor does have a nice new timing belt on it.

I stopped by the garage the other day to see how it was going and my friend said that he also got the turbo from the new motor because he was worried about the one that came out of my car. He said that the turbo and the intercooler both had a lot of oil in them, probably at least 1/4 to 1/2 of a quart of oil drained out of them when he took them out. He's a great mechanic but not necessarily an Audi specialist, but he's sure that there's no good reason for the turbo to have that amount of oil inside of it. So, I'm wondering what that would be from and was the turbo about to go?

Anyway, I guess my points for this topic are to warn everyone out there that if you run over something with your A4 that sounds even kind of bad, get out and check it out, because we have these great aluminum oil pans that can easily break and if you don't, just because you shut it down right after the oil light comes on, don't expect your engine to survive.

My question is about the oil in the turbo, is that somehow normal to have that much oil in it, or was I about to blow my turbo, too?