It strikes me that there's a certain amount of mythology involved in oil
selection. The British car enthusiasts who wrote the original article seemed
to be faithful, by coincidence, to a British brand of oil, as though there's
some affinity between car and oil because of their common national origin.
It's half science, half myth. For the same reason you don't want to be
served by a blond waitress in a Chinese restaurant, even if it's the same
food, you don't want to run Dutch Shell in your English MG. They don't even
speak the same language; how do you expect them to get along in there?

According to a mechanic friend, Porsche 356 owners have to run Redline,
whereas VW owners swear by M1. Who knows why. People on the Saab board go
for M1 or, sometimes, Royal Purple. But how much evidence do we really have?
There's a lot of hearsay, a lot of anecdote. The science is almost always
performed by the oil companies themselves, and since it isn't a food
product, there's no FDA to confirm or deny it.

After 35 years of car ownership, I couldn't demonstrate convincingly that
there's any difference whatsoever between oils, other than that the
viscosity makes a slight difference in the way the car idles. Before I was
married, my wife ran a Toyota pickup for over 110,000 miles without an oil
change (or anything else) and it still runs like a champ at almost 180K.
(Then again, it's a Toyota.)  With all due respect, my feeling is that a lot
of oil analysis and evaluation is Madison-Ave. mythmaking. Mobil is the #1
brand in synthetics because of Mobil's massive marketing campaign more than
a decade ago. Could anyone really demonstrate that it's "better" than Quaker
State or whatever in terms of engine longevity? Even if you take apart an
engine and find sludge in there, did the sludge really cause the engine to
fail? Where's the science?

I think I'm going to get some of that Slick 50, which lubricates so well you
can run your engine WITHOUT OIL! Dang! Really, I saw it on TV!

Now Bar's Leak, that stuff works.

Not?