so a friend of mine has a car that is both running rich and has white smoke coming out of the end of the exhaust. i think that he has both a coolant leak and a fuel delivery problem but he is convinced that there is no coolant leak and that the car is dumping so much fuel into the engine that not all of it is being burned in the cylinder and that the white smoke is from the gas burning in the headers. this is the first time ive ever heard of this happening. could he be right and that is an actual possibility or is he just ill informed?

 

sounds like coolant - he is going to have to fix the fuel problem anyway so he might as well do that and then see if its still there.
he could drain the oil and see if its part green - some coolant leaks do that.

 

Coolant burns white, and yes, coolant will burn. Excess fuel burns black.

 

How has he determined that it's running rich?

Smell? or a guage?

I cant think of any way to reliably determine AFR's with a serious coolant leak.

It can effect sparkplug coloring and widebands. Infact it might even change the factory narrow band sensor reading and effect fueling part time.


I say fix the coolant issue then re-asses the fueling issue.