What caused this???

[jott_06]

Ok i know this is about my car but a chevy's a chevy. But i decided to take my car to the drag races yesterday. It has a healthy 355 in it but nothing extreme. I raced it all day saturday with no problems and this morning i was getting ready to do time trials and i decided to check the oil and it looked like thousands of micro bubbles on my dipstick. I thought they were metal shavings though so i had another guy look at it and he said it was too fine for him to tell if it was metal or air bubbles. So i drove it home about 75 miles being easy on it and when i was almost home my buddy that followed me pulled up behind me and said it was smoking from underneath so i thought i probably hurt the motor. I kept driving though so i could get it home and when i popped the hood the intake and head on the drivers side were coated in oil so i figured my vavle cover gasket blew out causing all the oil to leak and thats where the smoke came from. I checked the oil again and it looked pretty clean with only 4 or 5 of the bubbles. So i am confused about what could have caused these bubbles or whatever they are. Also i heard before if you dont run a pcv valve it can blow gaskets. Well i dont run a pcv valve and i blew a gasket could the pcv valve also be the culprit for the oil problems?

[Boog]

Is your engine crankcase not vented at all? You say no pcv so does it have a valve cover breather of some type?

[Cannon007]

How much oil do you put into it? you should look into geting a betterr oil pan with 7qts and baffles that stop it from geting churned up and causing bubbles which can cause oiling problems, did you notice your oil gauge doing anything funky?

[jott_06]

Yes it does have a breather on each valve cover.

And i am runnng a stock oil pan right now.

[hyarbour]

A breather on each cover is fine, but you need some way of getting fresh air into the crankcase. Rig up a PCV

[beautimus]

I.m with cannon007 on this one.
if your not running a pcv valve you are losing some ponies.
the small amount of NORMAL blowby from the rings can presurize the engine. possibly blowing valve cover or the end intake gaskets. Also using the stock oil pan without a windage tray or crank scraper (spelling?) is whipping the oil into a froth at high rpms.
the engine is having to push this foamy oil out of the way of the rotating assembly, along with the excessive air inside the crank case.
it may not seem like much but it robs way more power than you would think it does. a while back hotrod or super chevy or one of those magazines ran an article on an aftermarket vaccuum that bolts to the front of the block on small block chevys. their test engine picked up several horse power with just that one modification. Theres more to it than it looks like.

another note on this one, if your running really high revs and seeing this foaming make sure you run a fresh oil change before you race, the anti foaming additives tend to go away between changes.
an oil pump can cavitate if the problem is really bad. (if enough oil is in the foamed state as to actually lessen the amount of liquid oil available at the pump) but a little foaming is not gonna be a big problem. but i can't say how much is too much. hope that helps.