Cayman GT4RS - Oil consumption
Discussion
I thought there were some bore scoring issues that lead to engine replacements?
With oil consumption being one of the main symptoms, my lack of Porsche obviously has me incorrect.
I would never consider that kind of oil consumption right or acceptable really, what a pain, something from 20 years ago maybe, I have a few classics that do but a 2023 car?
With oil consumption being one of the main symptoms, my lack of Porsche obviously has me incorrect.
I would never consider that kind of oil consumption right or acceptable really, what a pain, something from 20 years ago maybe, I have a few classics that do but a 2023 car?
SV_WDC said:
Believe cars with the suspected issue were given a straight replacement engine from the factory as this was deemed more economical than the man hours involved with dismantling, fixing & reassembling.
Not in the UK - stripping it down at the OPC and fitting the replacement con rod was exactly what they proposed to do with mine, which was why I politely asked for my deposit back - didn’t feel like a new car after it had been through that, but perhaps just being over sensitive. SV_WDC said:
The speculation around these engines is the oil consumption is due to the engine / particulate filters running significantly hotter to help with the emissions. This is why owners are seeing higher oil use even after the run-in period.
My Cayman GTS 4.0 is now to all intents and purposes run in. 1200 miles, varying load from day 1, but full throttle use sparingly over first 500 miles, and maximum revs used built up gradually from 4000. Runs hot on oil temperature (typically 112 - 114 degrees C once fully warmed through), dropping slightly in sports mode. Water temperature actually colder than my 981 GT4. Runs at 90 degrees C all the time. The old 981 GT4 runs with water at 102-103, oil similar or higher, unless the sport button is pressed. With sport button pressed both drop to 90 degrees.Despite the higher oil temperature, the GTS 4.0 has not yet shown the slightest drop in oil level through the running in period. I bought the 981 GT4 used, and it was using a bit of oil when I got it (300-500 ml per 1000 miles maybe). I put it back through my usual running-in routine, and oil consumption is now less than 100 ml per 1000 miles, including occasional track day use.
I’m not au fair with piston, ring and cylinder block differences between the GT4 RS and 982 GT4/GTS 4.0. However I’d have to hazard that if GT4 RS’s do habitually use oil, it cannot just be down to internal components’ running temperatures.
Probably a bit of a first world problem. A mate was telling me a few weeks ago that he’s on his 5th set of tyres in around 10,000 miles in his GT4 RS. He does a lot of hard miles on track days, but I’m hoping he might have been exaggerating a bit…
Liam
LiamH66 said:
My Cayman GTS 4.0 is now to all intents and purposes run in. 1200 miles, varying load from day 1, but full throttle use sparingly over first 500 miles, and maximum revs used built up gradually from 4000. Runs hot on oil temperature (typically 112 - 114 degrees C once fully warmed through), dropping slightly in sports mode. Water temperature actually colder than my 981 GT4. Runs at 90 degrees C all the time. The old 981 GT4 runs with water at 102-103, oil similar or higher, unless the sport button is pressed. With sport button pressed both drop to 90 degrees.
Despite the higher oil temperature, the GTS 4.0 has not yet shown the slightest drop in oil level through the running in period. I bought the 981 GT4 used, and it was using a bit of oil when I got it (300-500 ml per 1000 miles maybe). I put it back through my usual running-in routine, and oil consumption is now less than 100 ml per 1000 miles, including occasional track day use.
I’m not au fair with piston, ring and cylinder block differences between the GT4 RS and 982 GT4/GTS 4.0. However I’d have to hazard that if GT4 RS’s do habitually use oil, it cannot just be down to internal components’ running temperatures.
Probably a bit of a first world problem. A mate was telling me a few weeks ago that he’s on his 5th set of tyres in around 10,000 miles in his GT4 RS. He does a lot of hard miles on track days, but I’m hoping he might have been exaggerating a bit…
Liam
What’s your usual run in routine then ?Despite the higher oil temperature, the GTS 4.0 has not yet shown the slightest drop in oil level through the running in period. I bought the 981 GT4 used, and it was using a bit of oil when I got it (300-500 ml per 1000 miles maybe). I put it back through my usual running-in routine, and oil consumption is now less than 100 ml per 1000 miles, including occasional track day use.
I’m not au fair with piston, ring and cylinder block differences between the GT4 RS and 982 GT4/GTS 4.0. However I’d have to hazard that if GT4 RS’s do habitually use oil, it cannot just be down to internal components’ running temperatures.
Probably a bit of a first world problem. A mate was telling me a few weeks ago that he’s on his 5th set of tyres in around 10,000 miles in his GT4 RS. He does a lot of hard miles on track days, but I’m hoping he might have been exaggerating a bit…
Liam
bosshog said:
What’s your usual run in routine then ?
I feel like I’ve done this to death on PH over the last 5/6 years and 3 new Caymans. For road cars, and with a bit of following Porsche manual:First 500 miles: Varying load, avoiding full throttle (but getting engine under good load regularly), 4000 rpm max.
500 - 1000 miles: Increase maximum revs by 500 rpm for every 100 miles completed, gradually increase maximum load, using full throttle regularly from around 800 miles.
1000 - 1800 miles: normal use, but with care not to use too many revs until water is up to temperature, and oil reasonably warm. (This is my nod to the extremely long running in period recommended in the Porsche manual, which seems like overkill to me.)
For the whole of this period I also avoid excessive idling (car always driven gently to warm up), and running below 2000 rpm when moving, especially uphill.
It’s never ideal as an “on the road” exercise, and in the best of all worlds I’d be running the engines in on an engine dyno, where I’d have some instrumentation to help me understand whether everything’s bedding in as it should. Early in my career I afforded that luxury to a lot of other people’s (mainly race/rally car) engines. It’s a much better way, but cost prohibitive, and didn’t always go to plan.
Liam
There are many theories on running in, but if run in as badly as possible how much difference might that make to the oil consumption ??
These are standard cars built to modern tolerances ... not race cars built with the aim of maximum power asap and short hour rebuilds ... ??
I once had to "finish" running-in a new build race engine in qualifying ... needless to say it was no hardship to qualify last.
These are standard cars built to modern tolerances ... not race cars built with the aim of maximum power asap and short hour rebuilds ... ??
I once had to "finish" running-in a new build race engine in qualifying ... needless to say it was no hardship to qualify last.
TDT said:
I think the reason for the asking for the detail, was because you said you took your 981 GT4… which was already used? And essentially re-ran the break in using your method so now it consumes less than 100ml per 1000 miles.
What was the mileage on the GT4 when you acquired it?
I’d guessed that, and re-reading my response it comes across a lot shirtier than I intended it to. Wasn’t meant to be.What was the mileage on the GT4 when you acquired it?
GT4 had 7600 miles on it when I bought it, but probably closer to 10,000 when I decided to spend 1000 miles going through a late running in sequence. I’ll never know if it helped reduce the oil consumption. It may well have been that it was going to sort itself out anyway. The other thing that changed was that when I first got the car, on very light acceleration at motorway speeds in top gear, I could just hear the very light “pinking” of low load detonation. That disappeared completely at the same time as the oil consumption sorted itself out.
It now has the dreaded inertia reel seat belt guide rattle they sometimes get behind my right ear. Other than that is a much nicer car at 18,000 miles than it was when I bought it.
Liam
ChrisW. said:
There are many theories on running in, but if run in as badly as possible how much difference might that make to the oil consumption ??
<snip>
You might be surprised. I’ve come across 2 in road cars that seemed nigh on disastrous. One was a mate’s MG Maestro. He rebuilt the engine where we both worked back then, and for whatever reason ran it in as gently as he could on really good synthetic oil. I’ve got a feeling he might have bored and honed it himself too, when his main expertise at the time was in grinding cranks. By the time he’d put 2000 miles on it he went everywhere pursued by huge clouds of blue smoke. I sorted it for him in a couple of hours on the rolling road - had some special techniques and trade secrets for rings that were stubborn about bedding in, and it was fine after that.<snip>
The other one was a really sad story. TR7 V8 owner turned up with a “legal aid” case against another engine builder, saying that they had made a poor job of an engine rebuild because it was smoking and using so much oil just a few thousand miles after a rebuild. We popped the engine out and stripped it, and the rebuild had been spot on in every way. The only thing wrong with it was that the bores were so badly oil-glazed that the piston rings stood no chance of sealing against them. Our diagnosis was that the engine had far too little load while running in, and the rings had never seen sufficient cylinder pressure to seat onto the bores fully. Turned out to be quite an expensive way of making an unnecessary complaint.
I also saw a fair number of catastrophic running in issues with race engines. Glazed bearings, cracked blocks and heads, cam seizures, even had one Rover that managed to seize all 8 gudgeon pins into the pistons. It was no fun to disassemble, but required no new parts to get it back together and running perfectly. Just a few hours hand scraping the bearing surfaces in the pistons.
Doubt anyone could make a Porsche road car engine do any of the above, no matter how badly they ran it in.
Liam
High oil usage in a model of (performance) car has tended to point to longer term issues if it's really a common thing - or that's usually been my impression anyway and I'm not necessarily sure it's backed up with actual numbers. People are kind of the same so whether or not higher oil usage might be from running in, that should broadly be balanced out and if one model is burning (a lot) more oil vs another......it probably isn't the way it was run in that is the difference.
Thanks Liam,
Very interesting first hand experience.
I had a VW Lupo 1.7 diesel with 80,000 miles on the clock that very briefly kept showing an oil pressure warning light. It went into VW for an oil service with a note to check the warning. My son and future daughter-in-law borrowed the car to return to university and mentioned that the oil warning light kept blinking. I suggested that the car had been checked, was on fresh oil and to keep going at sensible speed.
The engine seized and was rebuilt by a VW specialist following which it then used a litre of oil every 1000 miles where previously it had used almost none. Lesson ? I still don't know.
My GT4 was run in similar to your method but in the early miles with light throttle below 4000 rpm and occasional forays under heavier throttle to an extra 1000 rpm or so followed by a cooling down period at very low load, and never laboured. I considered it fully run-in at 1500 miles at it did its first Oulton Park trackday at either 1500 or 2000 miles, I can't remember which.
A first oil and filter change including gearbox oil was at 2500 miles, first PCCB pads around 5000 miles ... and I'm currently on 34000+ miles and rarely add more than 500ml of oil between oil changes which I do at around 4000 miles ... ish.
The car is worked hard but very very rarely abused ... and it's a credit to Porsche that it still runs "better" than new. Of course it's been modified to deal better with trackday loads but even so, it's a road car.
Very interesting first hand experience.
I had a VW Lupo 1.7 diesel with 80,000 miles on the clock that very briefly kept showing an oil pressure warning light. It went into VW for an oil service with a note to check the warning. My son and future daughter-in-law borrowed the car to return to university and mentioned that the oil warning light kept blinking. I suggested that the car had been checked, was on fresh oil and to keep going at sensible speed.
The engine seized and was rebuilt by a VW specialist following which it then used a litre of oil every 1000 miles where previously it had used almost none. Lesson ? I still don't know.
My GT4 was run in similar to your method but in the early miles with light throttle below 4000 rpm and occasional forays under heavier throttle to an extra 1000 rpm or so followed by a cooling down period at very low load, and never laboured. I considered it fully run-in at 1500 miles at it did its first Oulton Park trackday at either 1500 or 2000 miles, I can't remember which.
A first oil and filter change including gearbox oil was at 2500 miles, first PCCB pads around 5000 miles ... and I'm currently on 34000+ miles and rarely add more than 500ml of oil between oil changes which I do at around 4000 miles ... ish.
The car is worked hard but very very rarely abused ... and it's a credit to Porsche that it still runs "better" than new. Of course it's been modified to deal better with trackday loads but even so, it's a road car.
ChrisW. said:
Thanks Liam,
Very interesting first hand experience.
I had a VW Lupo 1.7 diesel with 80,000 miles on the clock that very briefly kept showing an oil pressure warning light. It went into VW for an oil service with a note to check the warning. My son and future daughter-in-law borrowed the car to return to university and mentioned that the oil warning light kept blinking. I suggested that the car had been checked, was on fresh oil and to keep going at sensible speed.
The engine seized and was rebuilt by a VW specialist following which it then used a litre of oil every 1000 miles where previously it had used almost none. Lesson ? I still don't know.
My GT4 was run in similar to your method but in the early miles with light throttle below 4000 rpm and occasional forays under heavier throttle to an extra 1000 rpm or so followed by a cooling down period at very low load, and never laboured. I considered it fully run-in at 1500 miles at it did its first Oulton Park trackday at either 1500 or 2000 miles, I can't remember which.
A first oil and filter change including gearbox oil was at 2500 miles, first PCCB pads around 5000 miles ... and I'm currently on 34000+ miles and rarely add more than 500ml of oil between oil changes which I do at around 4000 miles ... ish.
The car is worked hard but very very rarely abused ... and it's a credit to Porsche that it still runs "better" than new. Of course it's been modified to deal better with trackday loads but even so, it's a road car.
had my VW 1.7 SDI until i sold it at 175k , never used a drop of oil.. never even topped it up.. amazing car Very interesting first hand experience.
I had a VW Lupo 1.7 diesel with 80,000 miles on the clock that very briefly kept showing an oil pressure warning light. It went into VW for an oil service with a note to check the warning. My son and future daughter-in-law borrowed the car to return to university and mentioned that the oil warning light kept blinking. I suggested that the car had been checked, was on fresh oil and to keep going at sensible speed.
The engine seized and was rebuilt by a VW specialist following which it then used a litre of oil every 1000 miles where previously it had used almost none. Lesson ? I still don't know.
My GT4 was run in similar to your method but in the early miles with light throttle below 4000 rpm and occasional forays under heavier throttle to an extra 1000 rpm or so followed by a cooling down period at very low load, and never laboured. I considered it fully run-in at 1500 miles at it did its first Oulton Park trackday at either 1500 or 2000 miles, I can't remember which.
A first oil and filter change including gearbox oil was at 2500 miles, first PCCB pads around 5000 miles ... and I'm currently on 34000+ miles and rarely add more than 500ml of oil between oil changes which I do at around 4000 miles ... ish.
The car is worked hard but very very rarely abused ... and it's a credit to Porsche that it still runs "better" than new. Of course it's been modified to deal better with trackday loads but even so, it's a road car.
ChrisW. said:
Thanks Liam,
Very interesting first hand experience.
<snip>
The engine seized and was rebuilt by a VW specialist following which it then used a litre of oil every 1000 miles where previously it had used almost none. Lesson ? I still don't know.
My GT4 was run in similar to your method <snip>
A first oil and filter change including gearbox oil was at 2500 miles, first PCCB pads around 5000 miles ... and I'm currently on 34000+ miles and rarely add more than 500ml of oil between oil changes which I do at around 4000 miles ... ish.
The car is worked hard but very very rarely abused ... and it's a credit to Porsche that it still runs "better" than new. Of course it's been modified to deal better with trackday loads but even so, it's a road car.
Thanks for saying Chris - I often worry that I bore quite a few people with ancient race and performance car “war stories.”Very interesting first hand experience.
<snip>
The engine seized and was rebuilt by a VW specialist following which it then used a litre of oil every 1000 miles where previously it had used almost none. Lesson ? I still don't know.
My GT4 was run in similar to your method <snip>
A first oil and filter change including gearbox oil was at 2500 miles, first PCCB pads around 5000 miles ... and I'm currently on 34000+ miles and rarely add more than 500ml of oil between oil changes which I do at around 4000 miles ... ish.
The car is worked hard but very very rarely abused ... and it's a credit to Porsche that it still runs "better" than new. Of course it's been modified to deal better with trackday loads but even so, it's a road car.
Good to hear your GT4 is behaving well for being worked hard and not abused, at about double the mileage on my one, but… Pads at 5000 miles? I changed “steel” discs and pads on my one at about 14,000 miles, but I’ve kept the old discs and had the lips machined off them. They aren’t even half way to minimum thickness yet, but the pads weren’t “right” (I think never run in…
). I wanted to know what the car felt like with all new discs and pads. I’ll be OK for brake discs for a good few years now!Apologies for the drift off topic all.
Liam
My PCCB pads were replaced at half worn after a few track days ... the pads had suffered heat damage and were badly cracked ... I replaced the discs with Surface Transform which run much cooler than PCCB's and I now get three times the number of track days out of each set of pads.
Back on topic, I was looking at a GT4RS today with under 900 miles on it at an OPC. I was rather surprised to see new tyres had been fitted to the rear, the original tyres on the front ... this could be seen from the mounting pads for the original balancing weights not having been cleaned off the inside of the rear wheels.
Could this be a cause of high oil consumption ?
Back on topic, I was looking at a GT4RS today with under 900 miles on it at an OPC. I was rather surprised to see new tyres had been fitted to the rear, the original tyres on the front ... this could be seen from the mounting pads for the original balancing weights not having been cleaned off the inside of the rear wheels.
Could this be a cause of high oil consumption ?
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