Subaru STI Oiling Issues and Donut Media's HiLow WRX Engine Failure

For this episode, DP and Jon tackle a 2010 Subaru WRX STI with a strange oil pressure issue and Donut Media's Engine failure in their HiLow WRX. What might have gone wrong? And are Subaru engines really that fragile?

For this episode of Hey, What's Your Problem, we start with our customer Will. DP helped him out with a problem over the course of a few weeks that started as a concern about low hot idle oil pressure. In fact, his idle oil pressure was so low, we weren't sure that it could be accurate. He was seeing 6psi of oil pressure at idle. But the other piece to the puzzle was that he was getting a P0021 CEL when the car was warm. The P0021 fault code is related to the AVCS system, and indicates that one of the cams was not properly advanced or retarded. Since that system is driven by oil pressure, it made it clear that more investigation would be recommended or necessary.

Will actually did a lot of diagnostic work as we worked with him on this, so we actually have a lot of information to work with, and this turned out to be a pretty interesting problem.

From there, we had to take a look at the recent engine failure that Donut Media had on their HiLow WRX series. The concerning part is that they had a failure after only 200 miles on a fresh build. So what could have happened, and what could have gone wrong?

Most importantly, what can you do to make sure that you don't have the same issue when you take your WRX/STI/BRZ to the track?

Thanks very much for listening and Stay Tuned!