Wrapper

[Lumberg]

2000 Camry, 1MZ-FE six cylinder, 90,000 miles. I gave it an oil change a few days ago, nothing unusual. Old oil maybe a bit dirty, but I run Castrol Syntec 0w30 so it's good oil.

So I was pulling out of a driveway and speeding up to cross three lanes of traffic and make a quick U-turn. It was wet and the tires were slipping a bit but nothing crazy. All of a sudden the car started vibrating like I had popped a tire or something. It was weird.

Anyway I continued on my u-turn, swerved a bit, tires & suspension seemed fine, so the vibration seemed then more like a miss. But it was definitely more than one cylinder. So I headed straight home, maybe 1 mile away.

I was being optimistic--pulled the timing belt cover--maybe slipped a tooth? Nope. Checked the motor mounts, nothing crazy.

Pulled all three front spark plugs. Left two (passenger side) were soaked with oil. Looking down the holes, leftmost one had a serious puddle of oil in it, middle one wet but could still see tip of piston. Driver's side plug dry.

So of course my biggest fear is a hole in a piston or broken ring. But how would the oil migrate to the next cylinder over (through the intake/exhaust?)?

Other source of oil is valve guide, but that's not usually sudden. Also seems like waaaay too much oil for that. Unless it's puddling up in the head.

The only other thing I can think of is a head gasket.

I am about to go examine the manuals for the gen4 and 1MZ-FE, but I wanted to run it by you guys first. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before--sudden catastrophic failure resulting in lots of oil in the combustion chambers. It went from running fine to missing on two cylinders in an instant.