Well folks, It's that time of year again.
Speed Channel is running its coverage of the SCCA Valvoline Run-Offs, their national championships.
Time for me to resurrect this thread and ask a question.
In case you aren't familiar with this absolutely priceless racing, SCCA is the Sports Car Club of America. It is a large group of (mostly) amateur racers in the USA and they race everything you can run on a road course: open-wheel formula cars, sports prototypes, production, GT and showroom stock cars. Each type of racing has a number of classes in it reflecting cars which are more or less expensive and have varying amounts of horsepower. They also have a hand being the sanctioning body for other race series like Trans-Am, Speed World Challenge and stateside rallying. For an overview of the classes (around 40 in all) take a look at
www.scca.org.
There are several SCCA regions throughout the country with their own competitors and every September, the championship drivers from each class in each region (along with their runners-ups) congregate at Mid-Ohio International Speedway for the SCCA NATIONAL championships, otherwise known as the Valvoline Run-Offs. In all, there are around 40 races over this 3-day weekend and
Speed Channel covers every one of them. They tape them in September and run them from now until January or so since there is so little live autoracing over the winter. Tape delay re-runs or not, they are fantastic road races and well worth your leisure time. Many father-and-son teams, guys that actually build their own cars ... just fabulous racing featuring everyday people and interesting cars everyone can identify with.
So, how does this tie in to the overall topic of oils and lubrication?
Sponsorship, pure and simple.
Last year I noticed that 2 out of 3 cars advertised Red Line Oil. This brand of boutique oil is a favorite among these types of racers - usually small engines turning usually 8,000+ RPMs. This year, however, I noticed that Valvoline stickers appear on roughly half the participants ... maybe even more than half. But, can all these cars wearing those stickers
actually be using off-the-shelf Valvoline Synpower synthetic (a generally unimpressive Group III oil with an indifferent additive package) or their straight-weight racing formulas which would produce a great amount of drag ... especially significant on the smaller, higher-RPM engines?
What is especially curious is the complete lack of any other oil sponsor. I've watched GT-4, Showroom Stock B, and Sports 2000 classes (F production on tape) but have not seen a single lube sponsor other than those two. Not one.
Now, I'm assuming it has something to do with Valvoline being the #1 sponsor of this event along with Red Line being a staple of this crowd. Does anyone know any of the deals which surrounded this event? Did Valvoline have any contingency money available to drivers showing their stickers on race cars? I'd really like to know what's going on behind the scenes.
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Bror Jace
