Fluid leak or Oil leak ?

[maydayone]

Hello Everyone,

Has any of you encountered a fluid leak in the location shown on the picture?

I struggle to locate the origin of it as the surrounding areas appear to be dry.

It's a 2014 1.0 ecoboost ford focus.

Thank you.

[unofix]

Never come across a Ford BBB 🤔

 

[maydayone]

7 minutes ago, unofix said:

Never come across a Ford BBB 🤔

 

Sorry about that... Corrected now

[unofix]

Pull the plastic engine cover off (just pulls straight up) and you'll get a better look. Most probably just oil vapor from a breather.

[maydayone]

Thank you for your reply.

If that's the case ,is this something requiring an immediate attention? I need to do fair bit of driving before I get a chance to have a look at it properly.

 

Thanks.

[JW1982]

oil residue at that location points to (micro) cracks in the valve cover.

This is unfortunately a well known problem of the 1.0 ECOboost.
 

For now I recommend to clean/degrease the valve cover and check how fast the oil comes back and how much oil is actually leaking. If the leak is very minor you can leave it as it is and just clean periodically.

replacement of the valve cover is not difficult but quite labour intensive and a new valve cover and high pressure fuel line (cannot be reused) from Ford are not particularly cheap.

[maydayone]

Thank you for your reply. Is it possible that this has something to do with the oil being overfilled when the car was serviced? (about 20mm over the max line)