Yukon just isn’t finding much silver or gold in motor oil. It’s too expensive right? Why would you put it in any way? Well ZDDP is having a hard time of it because of converters and environmental reasons. Au and Ag have several really nice properties along with Cu. Just getting the right dosing and method of suspension is a bit tricky, but not impossible.
For the right amount of money you can solve many problems. Many times you just need to think differently, like those boys that took the pole at Indy this weekend with a Rookie that had never raced that oval or any other. Sometimes it just takes a fresh look. Now just how did he do it? A gold plated engine? We know nothing and we’re not even there. Even though you can’t run a non standard oil in a spec engine during a race, does that mean you couldn’t have run a plating oil during practice and then replaced it for the race, having treated the friction robbing surfaces with a smoothing agent?
Now you ladies will like this next picture.
Why would you ever use gold? 90 % drop (COF down to ~0.01) is one reason. Hey, just saying your block matches your grill, is worth it to some. How about this? It’s not really going to help the embrittlement, but it can assist in other ways. Scientists are searching for solutions to get rid of ZDDP. It is a cheap solution to a problem with crude oils, jumbled mess of varying carbon chain lengths and variability under cold and heat. When you study crude oil you know its one bad solution, but it’s almost free so why not market the heck out of it.
We are a little opposite, invest in creating the best oil and additive packages and then hide it in race engines that people think are running crude oil or synthetic. We call ours NEOgenicTM because it isn’t synthesized from crude oil or gas. It is better, much better, so it deserves a new category beyond the API and other certifications game. We can and do make it work inside those groupings for a comfort factor but if you really want to go fast, we can do so much more than you dreamed possible. Why not publish our special sauce?
We had a young race driver that used our plant based oils to contend for a championships in two countries. He won 2 of 3. He moved up a class and the team left us for another chassis and engine builder. He went from leader to bottom quarter, but not because of talent. His engine builder was breaking in engines with synthetic oil, strike one. Strike two was his carb settings, we ran fat on the low end and lean on the top. Our oil allowed us to go where others would stick the piston. Strike three was a harmonics issue, strike 4 was mild steel Italian junk tubing. That driver has qualified on the front row of Indy, so he’s got the talent. But one of our factory team drivers felt sorry for this former team mate, and soon to be famous driver, and spilled the beans on the carb setting allowing them to move up 15 spots. We almost banned the crew chief for the helping of another outside team. He still didn’t have a chromoly chassis and his ring wasn’t seated so no big loss. The lesson is we aren’t going to give away tons of research, we will hint, we will deceive and lead people off track but we are doing the hard work.
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