...tell me what's the cheapest likely cause
Just aborted a ride today due to a load of oil down the side of the engine- it's an 00 so it has the seperate clutch cover, and most of the oil seems to be from there. But, it's not just near the bottom, there's oil splash all over the water pump cover too. I did have the clutch cover off a few days ago but it's not been leaking at all since that.
But, naturally as soon as I saw the leak, I checked the oil before returning home, and it was suspiciously high. I added oil the other day on the way home from the AR as I have a small persistant leak from the rear cam chain tensioner, but I'm sure it wasn't past the full marker. When I returned home it seems higher again- though I'm not going to say 100% that this is the case, I checked it more carefully here than in the petrol station as at the time i was just checking to make sure it wasn't too low.
So, oil levels rising- you suspect petrol past the rings or coolant in the petrol, right?
The dropped oil looks pretty thin, no obvious petrol smell, no obvious water contamination "yoghurt" but it's cooling down now so I'll have another look once it's cooled
Throw in a couple more symptoms- yesterday, it was running a little hot in what were not hot running conditions- the fan came on while stationary for a couple of minutes which is very, very rare, it wasn't hot here.
Also a random loss of power on the way home while filtering on steady throttle, exactly like fuel starvation- I thought for a moment I was out of fuel but it quickly stopped when I returned to idle. This might just be a seperate "weird thing".
It's not lupus
My first instinct is just to take off the clutch cover and reattach with a wee bit of hylomar to give it a solid seal, and see if there's anything else going on, but obviously I'm concerned about the possible rising oil thing. I've not checked the coolant levels for a while, so if they're low that doesn't neccesarily tell me anything but I'll be doing that in a minute anyway.