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Citroen C4 2005, Petrol

Very rarely I happen to turn without braking properly and my forward momentum is quite high. In these situations I can feel the strain on my front wheels being very high. What happens occasionally is, my SERVICE light comes on for just a second, while the turning lasts and then when normal operations resume, the light goes off as if nothing happened.

My questions is, what exactly is being triggered here? What system gets overwhelmed, and why?

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It could be that you are cornering so hard that you're pushing the oil in the sump to one side, away from the pickup pipe. This temporarily means you're oil pump is sucking up air and you are starving your engine of oil.

Competition cars are equipped with with baffled sumps or dry sump systems to prevent this happening. In a standard road car, this type of cornering is best avoided if at all possible.

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  • 2
    This is very true. I have also seen this when the oil level is low, thereby not being enough to keep the pickup covered in hard cornering.
    – CharlieRB
    Jun 17 '16 at 11:58
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    In one of my cars, I could always tell the oil was getting low when the lifters would start ticking after a hard turn.
    – rpmerf
    Jun 17 '16 at 12:04
  • Good one , Never would have guessed it :-)
    – Shobin P
    Jun 17 '16 at 13:11
  • This happens to my car that has an oil leak. After a while, it starts doing this more and more often.
    – user3188168
    Jun 17 '16 at 21:32
  • @user3188168 I do have a leak as well tbh. But this happens almost never as I very very rarely corner that fast and sharp.
    – Иво Недев
    Jun 18 '16 at 7:03

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