Quote:
Originally Posted by Oktom2
I changed the engine oil very recently.
What should I be looking for at the next change?
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You can just take a sample of your oil in a clean container and ship it to a lab to do analysis on it. They will process the oil to determine if there is internal damage. Excessive heat in the turbo could have essentially cooked the oil in a process called coking, where extreme temps cause oxidation of the oil and it forms hard shards of carbon deposits. This can cause additional wear etc. in your engine or block oil passages. They can also look for bearing material etc.
It's actually pretty cheap considering how much insight you can gain from it. If you have an engine or turbo issue, this can pick it up before you have a big mechanical failure that would cost even more to fix.
If you don't want to pay though, you can always just do a quick and dirty physical analysis yourself. Drain the oil and run a magnet through it, you should get almost no pickup of ferric fragments in "healthy" oil.
Cut open the filter and then the filter element, see if there are obvious flecks of metal in the filter. Anything like that is a bad sign.
However, I would bet that your car is probably fine. The fact that it was still running, and just seemed to be down on power is a good sign.