Hi Buster
I don't have any personal experience with Redline but we do see high lead levels where the cause is not obvious. Conditions in the oil can change and affect the solubility of lead so it will go up without being an indicator of wear. We frequently see this with degraded oil when the oxidation-sulfation-nitration numbers are high. In the case of Redline it is probably due to the oil's formulation and an additive reacting with the lead in the bearings or soldered parts in the engine. This isn't necessarily a bad thing and in fact it is usually harmless. Some additives can cause the same thing and some additives themselves contain very high levels of lead. Glycol in the oil can also drive up lead and copper due to chemical reactions and not necessarily wear. It would be interesting to see if the high lead is happening when conditions favor condensation since water hydrolyzes esters to form acids and certain acids can react with lead.
I can't speak for GM bearings but the engines we work with (heavy-duty diesels) the bearings have a lead and tin overlay with a very thin layer of copper and then aluminum (or vice versa) and finally the steel backing. We look for elevated levels of tin to help us decide it bearing wear is occurring or not. If tin is not up then most likely it isn't abnormal wear; this of course depends of the construction of the bearing.
I think some folks try to attach too much significance to slight changes of wear elements. There are many factors that can affect the levels reported on the report, things such as instrument limitations, interferences, the actual wear mechanism and particle size, etc. Most of the labs I am familiar with run with a +/- 10% check standard (some go even higher for certain elements) so this is the normal error you would expect to see. In our lab we run the check standard every 24 samples and if it doesn't pass the instrument recalibrates itself and starts all over again. Lead, tin, sodium, and antimony are soft metals and poor emitters so they are hard to read (the signal is weak and hard to pull out of the noise). These metals can have more error than the hard metals (strong emitters) like chrome, nickle, iron, etc. which give strong signals. When people start adding additives it is possible to have interferences that go undetected. Before anyone starts criticizing the labs for not getting absolute accuracy remember what you are paying for an analysis and then go to an environmental lab or some of the other labs on the Internet and ask them what they charge to run just one element (not 21). Don't be shocked if you see the price is well over $100! Fortunately the accuracy we get is sufficient for what oil analysis was intended.
I don't think it's wear as we think of it, which if we could prove, would ease a lot of fear for potential RL users.
