Oil is like coffee, there’s Starbucks, Dunkin', mid sized like Peets, Dutch brothers, and then the local corner coffee shop. So There’s the big players like Mobile, Pennzoil, Castrol and you name it that have a ton of money and can buy a ton of ad space for people to buy their products based on name alone. Then you have the mid sized oil companies, like Red Line (which is now owned by Phillips Conaco, AKA 76) Amzoil, Lucas, Royal purple etc, then you have the boutique oil companies like Gibbs aka “Driven”, Penn Grade was Brad Penn, Troquo, Swepco, and others that let their products speak from them selves. These companies makes oils for specialized applications and are of a higher quality than the name brands you see at the parts stores.
The name brands are the basic bitches used for everyday street **** boxes that are disposable, ever been you a junk yard? The store brand oils are co-packed by the large oil companies to a formula that was worked on the modern cars and a price point that the store can make a good margin on. The new cars rolling of the line have a recommendation of using VR1 for instance as the oil company can sell more of that oil and the car maker will get a kick back. It’s as simple. It’s all based on money. So that said, when you have pro racing teams most of the pro drag teams have sponsors, either money for name placement or product for use in said car (like Justice Brothers) vintage racers and sportsman racers are for the most part self funded and buy the quality products that will make their machines last. So this leaves you with, expensive boutique, kinda expensive mid-grade, slightly expensive basic ***** name brand and cheap ***** store brand.
It’s funny, I use all levels, Penn Grade in my built 340, Red Line in my girls Subaru, Castrol high mileage in my 02 Ram 5.9 mag, and cheap store oil in my 04 Colorado.
so it come down to application of oil for which one to pick.
so pick your poison and motor on.
And like I said before, my brother uses Penn Grade in the Cosworth DFV’s he builds…
