Warm start - oil smoke from exhausts

[SpawnyWhippet]

When I restart my engine when its still warm, very occasionally a big cloud of oil comes out the exhausts. I haven't found a reliable way to reproduce this, and it only happens maybe twice a month. The car has 60k km (40k miles) on the clock and otherwise the engine seems healthy, with no adverse temp or pressure readings. Should this be expected, or am I likely to be getting a large bill soon?

(I only recently found that I should be idling the car at shut down to cool the turbos, although I usually drive in city traffic at 20mph and the turbos rarely kick in.)

[wross996TT]

I am assuming you mean smoke, not oil comes out of the exhaust. First, what is the color of the smoke? White smoke: White smoke is caused by coolant entering the cylinder, and the engine trying to burn it with the fuel. The white smoke is steam. Blue Smoke: Blue smoke is caused by oil entering the cylinder area and being burned along with the fuel air mixture. Black Smoke: Black smoke is caused by fuel that has entered the cylinder area and cannot be burned completely. Second what you describe sounds quite normal. Third, cooling the turbos should be a habit...regardless of how far or how hard you run them (if the engage at all). Realize they are cooled almost entirely by the oil that runs through them. The second you shut your car down...the oil flow stops. Look at the turbos after a short ride...now touch them...they are hot. Just let them cool 90-120 seconds, always (even when you stop for gas).

[SpawnyWhippet]

I am assuming you mean smoke, not oil comes out of the exhaust. First, what is the color of the smoke? White smoke: White smoke is caused by coolant entering the cylinder, and the engine trying to burn it with the fuel. The white smoke is steam. Blue Smoke: Blue smoke is caused by oil entering the cylinder area and being burned along with the fuel air mixture. Black Smoke: Black smoke is caused by fuel that has entered the cylinder area and cannot be burned completely. Second what you describe sounds quite normal. Third, cooling the turbos should be a habit...regardless of how far or how hard you run them (if the engage at all). Realize they are cooled almost entirely by the oil that runs through them. The second you shut your car down...the oil flow stops. Look at the turbos after a short ride...now touch them...they are hot. Just let them cool 90-120 seconds, always (even when you stop for gas).

Thanks for the info wross996TT. Sorry, you're correct, I meant a cloud of oil smoke. It is blue and there is a worryingly large amount of it when this (intermittently) happens.

I'll cool my turbos from now on, although I'm surprised the Porsche dealer didn't mention this when I bought the car and also that the car doesn't have some kind of warning or prevention mechanism to stop you shutting it down as soon as you stop.

[wross996TT]

I found some (maybe most) dealers know very little about our cars. They can not install turbo timers as they interfer with the alarm system. There is a warning in the manual, but I got most of my information from guys that build and re-build turbos and have to deal with the mistreatment. How often do you add oil? Do you add it to the top? Sometimes it can be overfilled, but having the intermittent smoke should not be too worrisome.

Cheers.