Good evening, Im a lucky owner of a Ferrari 208 gts turbo of 1985. The car is good, but I have some problem that Im not able to understand. When I turn it on, there is no smoke from exhaust but after some minutes, keeping the engine at minimum RPM, start coming white smoke. The white smoke desappear when I increase the RPM of the engine. If I run by road, the car has normal performances and doesnt issue any smoke, but when I stop it for some reason like at a traffic light, and the engine go down to the minimum RPM, after some seconds the white smoke start again. Its enough to keep the engine at 1500 1800 RPM to avoid the smoke. I checked the oil and the cooling liquid levels and there is not decreasing; everything its good and normal. The car shows sometime a little blu smoke (burned oil) when its cold, but I think this is normal for a 32 years old car. I tried to change oil type, air filter, spark plug, but nothing has changed. At this point Im supposing that I have some problem at the injectors or some little oil leakage at the turbo system. Due to the engine is similar to the 308 (208 is only 2000 cc) and the injection system is almost the same like the 308i (except turbo system) Ill be really gratefull if someone can give me some suggestion or can tell me how he has solved the same problem.
Possibly valve stem seals ? Normally there will be evidence on the spark plugs, with white crusty deposits building up on the electrodes over time Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Normally, white smoke is water in the oil. Check the dipstick and see if it is milky in color. If so, it's water contamination. Also check the water for oil in it. It could be a blown head gasket or some kind of leak in the head but that's pure speculation.
I checked the spark plugs finding normal conditions. Sometimes the car, after one hour running, start working normally without smokewhen I stop it, but sometimes after some kilometers, it start having white smoke again when I stop it. It’s very difficult to understand the problem because the coming of the white smoke is not the same at different time. I didn’t consider the presence of water in the engine oil and, as I told last time the level of the cooling liquid is normal and doesn’t decrease. How could be possible the water went to oil ? I’m starting thinking that sometimes some injector remains completely open when I stop the car keeping the engine RPM at the minimum. Do you think that another solution could be to change type of oil ? if yes, what type of oil is better, considering that this car was made on 1985, and the common type of oil suggested at that time were semisynthetic ?
What is the outside air temperature when you're seeing the white smoke? Here in Canada, white exhaust smoke is normal for all cars for 5 months of the year or so when it's cold out - all exhaust from every engine has a certain amount of water vapour, and depending on temperature and humidity, the water vapour can form white smoke as the exhaust mixes with ambient air.
White smoke is water getting into the combustion chamber, not into the oil. Likely you have a blown head gasket. The blue smoke is likely from worn rings/cylinders. An easy way to test for worn rings is to do a compression test. Then add some oil to the cylinder (through the spark plug hole), and test again. If the compression goes up, you have worn rings/cylinders. You could probably just hone the cylinders, and fit new rings. And at the same time fit new head gaskets. Increasing the oil weight to say 20/50 might alleviate the worn rings symptom temporarily, but that won't cure the white smoke problem at all.
White smoke = water/coolant burning in the combustion chamber, Overfilling and oil temperature expansion has been known to cause overflow back into the air intakes and this do burn off as white smoke.
Not sure if what's white smoke to you might actually be oil burning smoke but what's got my attention is that it's a 1985 MY and it has turbos. Those are probably not water cooled turbos but oil cooled for the center section bearings. You can tell by a lack of water plumbing to the turbos. They tend to fail much sooner on the oil seals, I've been there many times. Try driving the car down a long hill using engine as a brake. When you get to the bottom if you have a cloud of smoke coming out of your tailpipes them you might have a failed turbo(s). Bob S.
