Aluminum Oil Pan Woes

So the track opened tonight for the first time of the season for some test and tune, and now that the Dart was running good I was ready to see just how good and hopefully finally put some numbers to the build. As I was waiting in the pits for my dad to show up and to take the car to tech he looks under it when he gets there and says "You've got a leak".

I poke my head under the car and even just sitting 15 minutes waiting for him to show up it had made a 10" puddle under the car. It was dripping constantly, a few drops every few seconds. I grab a rag and wipe it down and find out there was a 2 inch crack right down one of the welds on my aluminum pan. Tried to seal it up real quick with silicone or JB weld, but it was pouring too much to do anything without draining the pan. Long story short I never got the chance to make a pass and hurried it home to fix it up.

I believe the pan is a Weldtech pan (bought off of Ebay). It's a fabricated aluminum piece that I've had on the car for about a year now. It had one little pinhole on the pan rail when I first got it that I sealed up pretty easy, but otherwise I haven't had an issue until today. When I got the car home and drained the oil and cleaned up the weld to fix it I found out the crack was more like 4 inches long down the seam on the bottom of the pan. So if you have a Weldtech pan you might want to check over all of your welds to see if you have any issues. I haven't hit the pan on any bumps or anything to my knowledge (no scrapes visible on the pan), so I have no idea where this came from, but I just wanted to pass on the heads up.