Fretting fatigue is a common type of failure of the bearing cap bolted joints. This paper proposes a methodology to analyze the fretting fatigue mechanism of the bearing cap bolted joint. A biaxially loading system was designed to simulate fretting fatigue failure under typical engine working condition. Meanwhile, a submodel was developed in the finite element calculation to analyze the contact status and stress distribution of the structural models. The test result shows that long inclined cracks (about 650 μm long, orientation at 17°-34°) initiate at the middle region of the contact interface. As the increase of the bolt pretension load (from 6000 N to 10,000 N), the crack initial location is getting away from the bolt screw, and the fretting fatigue lives is increasing (from 7.8 × 10(5) to 6.0 × 10(6)). With the fatigue phenomenon and the stress field analysis result, it concludes that the crack initiation is governed by the maximum shear stress; the bolt pretension load and the additional rotate torque caused by the bearing load are the two main factors which affect the fretting fatigue mechanism of the bearing cap bolted joints. It is beneficial to fretting fatigue lives of the bearing cap joints by increasing the bolt pretension load and restraining the oscillation of the bearing cap.