308 Overheated Bad....

That's about all you can do.
How long was the drive for? Was there a lot of stop and start traffic, or was it mostly highway?

 

Yes 'Grasshopper', a wee bit of an overreaction at this point.

A 'check engine' light didn't come on because the car doesn't have one. It does have a slow down light, but that's activated by the temp of the cat.

Top off the coolant and run it. Make sure you 'burp' the system of air.

Look for any abnormalities......if any observed......dig deeper. If none, drive and enjoy.

 

Ditto, top up the coolant...drive on. Anything more you do is of little consequence, other than making you "feel" better...

Hopefully you are no worse for wear.

 

Contact Eric Schaller on this forum. He builds a custom billet waterpump for 308's. I have one of his and I probably have the coolest running 308 ever. The last two weeks at home was 100+ and my guage (Euro) did not go a hair over 90. Simply an awesome waterpum with extremely high output.

 

Get into the habit of checking your gauges every few minutes. It only takes a split second to scan them while you drive.

Aluminum engines are far more susceptible to damage from overheating than the old iron blocks.

 

Very True. If you blew a headgasket that is serious. After you get the car running correctly check for fluids mixing. Oil in coolant, coolant in oil, exhaust in coolant. It doesn't take long to warp and aluminum head especially if the gauges are maxed out. Always watch your gauges. It is too risky not to.

 

That's a good case in point for watching gauges. Another option to consider in the future is to install a fan switch over-ride switch, so you can turn on the fans at will, in the event of a failure.

Good luck!

 

Changing the fluids is a great idea, all I would do is refill the coolant and fix the fan. Dropping the oil pan is really over kill. If there was water boiling out, that's a good thing, it means there was still coolant in the system touching the hot parts. It's almost certainly just fine. Change the fluids and fire it up. The only thing that might have happened is a head gasket, but probably not, 308s are pretty good that way.

 

I had this type of thing happen to me three times. The first was the day after I bought it (84 308). Bad water pump with the spewing and hissing. That was Sept 1997. Next I broke the belt on the water pump in 1998. It got hot enough again to spit, whistle, and blow coolant. Another busted belt in 2000 and the same results from overheating. (I have no idea why the belts were giving me such a problem).

I have had no problems since the last incident over 4 years and 25,000 miles ago (with well over 1000 of those miles being hard track driving) she has nearly 90,000 miles on her now and still runs hard. These are tough cars. You should be just fine.

 

I had a similar experience back in '01 or '02 when my wp siezed up & melted the belt. By the time I spotted the temp gauge heading for the peg & steam coming from the bonnet, & could shut the car down, it was blowing coolant steam out the reservoir overflow tube with a very noticable whistle.

After it cooled down, a compression test was fine. No sign of coolant in the oil. Just rebuilt the wp, refilled w/coolant & have put almost 10K miles on it since.