03 RS6 engine oil leak!

[gsyal]

I noticed a slow oil leak from back of engine on the passenger side . Whether car is running or not it leaks almost a drop a minute. If I run the car then oil burns and can see smoke coming with hood popped up. Car has around 55k miles and had no leak related issues before. Checked the car on hoist, cant seem to see any obvious source of leak, seems like somewhere between the engine and firewall on passenger side.Anyone ever experienced this issue before?

[Hy Octane]

Yes. Can be a few different things.. Valve cover gasket, cam tensioner plugs (most likely culprit)..

There are some common failures that happen to all which manifest themselves as oil leaks. I have had oil leak from just about every place it can.. dont be alarmed.. You have a warranty?

[gsyal]

The valve cover gasket though seems like seeping little oil but nothing that seems to run down the floor. This leak seems to originate somewhere in the middle of engine in the turbo area, passenger side. I think it could be that loose banjo bolt issue which I just read somewhere in this forum.

[lswing]

If it's lacking oil to the turbos you're gonna burn one or both and be out $5k, get that to a shop asap, might just need to be tightened up, sounds more like a line that a seal if it's leaking that bad...good luck!

[hahnmgh63]

gsyal, when I looked at mine last night I could fairly easily get at the Banjo on top of the Turbo but in my case I removed the Secondary Air Injection system when I had my engine out so that does make access to the tops of the Turbos quite a bit better. I'll try to get it on the lift today or tomorrow and take a look at the bottom. Right off hand I would think it would be easy to get at the Banjo bolt on the bottom.

[SFJ_RS6]

This sounds similar to the turbo oil leak I had recently, and it was caused by a loose banjo bolt on the RH turbo oil supply line. The secondary air injection system is intact on my car, and I couldn't see a way to tighten the bolt with the engine in the car. Mark ^ may see a way to access, but I ended up taking the engine out.

To try to confirm whether the turbo is the source of the leak, take off the right front tire and with a flashlight look above the inner CV boot heat shield and see if there is oil there. Here is a picture of what mine looked like. The second picture shows what it looks like out of the car. The banjo bolt with the Allen wrench is the turbo oil supply line, which was noticeably loose.

Good luck with this!

Steve