Valvoline Extended Protection 5w30, 5800 Miles, 2001 Mercury Grand Marquis 4.6 Modular

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Here's my first oil analysis on my 2001 Mercury Grand Marquis with Valvoline Extended Performance 5w30 and a Fram Ultra ran for 5800 miles, the report has less miles listed because I have 215/70r16 tires on the car so my correction factor for mileage is around 4%. Car averaged 21 MPG, with mostly 45-55 mile per hour driving and roughly 1200 miles of highway driving and virtually no city driving. Air Filter used was a fram ultra also.
 

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Cool, thanks. Your wear metals are exception, IMO, for 5800 miles. The oil did a great job.
You're welcome!!! I was very impressed, I have a lot of faith in valvoline oils and this pretty much cemented it. Now I'm left with the question of what else can I try, because I think these numbers are gonna be extremely hard to beat. Currently I have Valvoline Maxlife Synthetic 5w30 in the sump, when I go to rotate my tires in 2500 miles I'm gonna drain a quart out and put some HPL sae 30 engine flush in and run that for 2000-2500 miles and change the oil at 5000. I'll post that UOA next, should be about 2-2.5 months till I post that. The motor is already exceptionally clean inside but figured why not.
 
Meh - pretty average wear rates. Not bad by any means, but not exceptional. The numbers are "normal" (statistically expected) and I've seen lots of oils do the same thing. You average around 2ppm of Fe per 1k miles; that's totally typical for the mod motors.

Here are my two Grand Marquis from a few years back ...
In there you can see that I used both a syn oil (Peak) and a house brand dino (Rural King).
All my OCIs were 10k miles. On 5w-20.
Neither oil did "better" than the other; not enough data to statistically make that determination.
But what can easily be concluded is that both oils did very well; my Fe wear rates were very low; all below 1ppm/1k miles (lower than your Maxlife UOA here, which was at 2ppm/1k miles). In short, even my el-cheapo Rural King dino oil had half the Fe wear that your syn Maxlife did.

Your numbers are not hard to beat; not by a long shot. But the real misunderstanding afoot is that you think a single UOA is doing to determine one oil better than another; that's patently false. Normal variation in wear rates from day-to-day, month-to-month, are going to make it impossible to clearly define a winner or loser. To do so, you'd need at least 60 UOA samples; 30 of each lube. At 5k miles, it would take you 300k miles to run a "test" between two oils. Anything less than that is statistical folly.

The Ford mod motors generally have low wear rates no matter what brand or grade you put in them. Pick whatever lube you want; it won't make a difference in the long term.
 
I thought a crown vic could get 25-27 on the highway. Am I wrong on that or do you have a heavy foot?
 
Meh - pretty average wear rates. Not bad by any means, but not exceptional. The numbers are "normal" (statistically expected) and I've seen lots of oils do the same thing. You average around 2ppm of Fe per 1k miles; that's totally typical for the mod motors.

Here are my two Grand Marquis from a few years back ...
In there you can see that I used both a syn oil (Peak) and a house brand dino (Rural King).
All my OCIs were 10k miles. On 5w-20.
Neither oil did "better" than the other; not enough data to statistically make that determination.
But what can easily be concluded is that both oils did very well; my Fe wear rates were very low; all below 1ppm/1k miles (lower than your Maxlife UOA here, which was at 2ppm/1k miles). In short, even my el-cheapo Rural King dino oil had half the Fe wear that your syn Maxlife did.

Your numbers are not hard to beat; not by a long shot. But the real misunderstanding afoot is that you think a single UOA is doing to determine one oil better than another; that's patently false. Normal variation in wear rates from day-to-day, month-to-month, are going to make it impossible to clearly define a winner or loser. To do so, you'd need at least 60 UOA samples; 30 of each lube. At 5k miles, it would take you 300k miles to run a "test" between two oils. Anything less than that is statistical folly.

The Ford mod motors generally have low wear rates no matter what brand or grade you put in them. Pick whatever lube you want; it won't make a difference in the long term.
I'm not saying they're the best numbers in the world, but I for all the short warm up times in cold weather (less than 20 seconds), full throttle pulls, sort trips and just fun in general I'm happy.
 
You should be! That’s a fine report on a sparingly driven and 20 year old car. Keep it going.
It got 40,000 on it from the first owner in 16 years, 24,000 from the second owner in 2 years and so far 19,000 from me in the past 17 months. Not sparingly driven anymore but I'm loving every minute of it! I'm hitting 1700-1800 miles a month now.
 
Considering how low TBN tends to start on SP Oils, the fact that TBN was D4739 (Hard Base instead of Total) and the Oxidation and Nitration Numbers are well controlled (and we don't have starting numbers) are you going to try 7500 mi for the next one?
 
Considering how low TBN tends to start on SP Oils, the fact that TBN was D4739 (Hard Base instead of Total) and the Oxidation and Nitration Numbers are well controlled (and we don't have starting numbers) are you going to try 7500 mi for the next one?
Probably not, I always put my vehicles on my lift every 2500-3000 miles and give them a once over, tire rotation etc. Would feel weird to me not to change the oil every other time.
 
Generally, wear rates continue to drop as the OCI matures all the way out to 15k miles. You could easily do every 3rd time on the lift, probably 4th and possibly 5th with UOA confirmation. I realize it seems weird not to do something; not to change oil. But the fact is that the UOA data won't lie to you.
 
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