quote:
AMSOIL Formulations - Creation of Specialty Oils
Q. I am heavily involved in the sport of drag racing. Other oil manufacturers have light weight oils such as a 10 weight or 11 weight oil. The super light oils are very popular in drag racing. I was wondering if AMSOIL has ever considered making such an oil?
A. There are many applications that require specialty oils as determined by the vehicle or equipment manufacturer or as determined by high performance enthusiasts. With regard to vehicle and equipment manufacturers, they generally do not release a specification that would allow AMSOIL to build a product to meet the required performance. This is done to protect the sales of those products from other companies such as AMSOIL. We strongly disagree with this approach and believe in some cases it is even illegal. We do our best to analyze those applications and the oil that is used. In some cases, we are able to either develop a product or find a current product in our line that fulfills the requirements. In other low volume applications, we simply do not pursue a replacement product, but rather focus our efforts on the other lubricants for that vehicle.
With regard to the performance enthusiast, many times a current AMSOIL product will fulfill the need better than a competitive "specialty oil." Other oil companies will try a different approach such as assigning a meaningless viscosity grade to convince customers that their oil is better when, in fact, it is not. Remember that AMSOIL Synthetic Lubricants are specialty oils in their own right and the same oil that is used in your everyday passenger car is the exact same product used in racing.
To be specific and answer the question above, we recommend our current products. There is technically no such thing as an SAE 10 or 11. There is an SAE 10W which is a cold temperature measurement. The SAE J-300 specs only recognize oils down to a SAE 20. We have seen other companies use SAE 5, 7.5, 10, etc. as identifiers for the products when in fact, it is meaningless. If we were to have a sample in the lab and look closely at the viscosity characteristics of the product, we could tell exactly what it was and make a recommendation for which AMSOIL product we would recommend. Our Technical Services Department would be the one to follow up with on a request like that by using the TSR request form found in the Dealer Zone.
