What oil?

[Feffman]

Spoke/texted with a friend having his S54 bearings replaced in his race car as we speak. He has WPC bearings and has been running Total Quartz 10W-60 synthetic racing oil with LiquiMoly Cera Tec (https://products.liqui-moly.us/cera-tec-1.html) . This will be fun to compare if the LiquiMoly additive actually helped when I tear down my motor.

[Arith2]

If you had a failure within 5000 miles, it's not the most recent oil change where the bulk of the damage was done. Those bearings were going to pop no matter what you put in there at that point.

I'm going to pull the 5 out that aren't welded to the crank and check them in the next week or two. I definitely want to see how bad they are. The engine I just bought had bearings that were in such good condition, I would've put them back if I hadn't bought bearings already. It

[M3_Dust]

Olive for light sauteing
canola for frying

[IamFODI]

FCP Euro completely changes the game for oil. After just 1 lifetime exchange, the effective price drops so low that there's no way anything from any other vendor could possibly be worth the money. Like, there's no way for an engine oil to extend the life of an engine by enough to offset the price difference.

[Mspir3d]

BMW Twinpower 10w60. The lifetime replacement through fcpeuro keeps me consistent.

[terra]

I installed my oil wrong??? Bearings were put in by BMW in 2006.

If you had a failure within 5000 miles, it's not the most recent oil change where the bulk of the damage was done. Those bearings were going to pop no matter what you put in there at that point.

[Arith2]

If your bearings went out after 5k then I'm more inclined to think that there was an improper install. Of course, there's no way to prove it and you're being biased toward an oil that many others are using with no complications and without using additional additives.

I installed my oil wrong??? Bearings were put in by BMW in 2006.

[beefaroni]

Redline 15w-50 per Bimmerworld's recommendation

[DESMDR3]

I switched from motul 10w60 to redline 5w50. ~3k between oil changes. I’m on my second oil change with the 5w50, I forgot to sample the first time lol

[IamFODI]

HofmeisterKinky.

[Tbonem3]

Interesting. What Motul did you use in the trans? And I'm assuming Gear Competition 75W-140 in the diff, yeah?

What was your username on m3forum?

[IamFODI]

Also used Motul in the last tranny and diff oil changes.

Interesting. What Motul did you use in the trans? And I'm assuming Gear Competition 75W-140 in the diff, yeah?

[Altaran]

Motul 8100 X-Power 10W60 for the Motor. Also used Motul in the last tranny and diff oil changes. Same will happen once I refresh my steering.

[stash1]

Still running straight 20wt olive oil and all is well!

[IamFODI]

Basically means nothing - interesting, that’s a fairly definitive statement. Is that from the view point of a certified tribologist, a petro-chemical engineer, or one with none of these qualifications and who is a car enthusiast like most here

Of those options, definitely the last one.

FWIW, here's a keyhole glimpse at what real criteria sets for engine lubricants look like: Afton Chemical - Oil Specification Handbook.pdf

Scroll to your favorite API, ACEA, or OE spec and look at the criteria. Few things you'll notice:

1. There's a lot of testing in actual engines;
2. There are many different criteria covering many different aspects of the oil's performance, virtually none of which involve additive PPMs or starting TBN; and
3. All of the tests are rigorously defined (equipment, procedure, thresholds, tolerances, etc.) and backed by extensive research that shows how they relate to actual performance in real engines in real scenarios.

In other words, the people who do this stuff for a living don't like to choose engine oils based on an incomplete list of ingredients and/or a very small number of un-validated tests on homemade rigs. They want to look at a lot of different aspects of performance, using extensively validated methods and actual engines.

The "lubricity"/"friction"/"film strength" rigs Piotr Tester and Project Farm use share their overall design with the "one-arm bandit," a machine that sorta-kinda-mimics the Timken OK Load test. The real Timken OK Load test is well defined and accepted for extreme pressure (EP) performance, which is very important for greases and gearbox lubes. But there's almost nothing in an engine that sees similar kinds of loads, and formulating a lubricant for very high levels of EP performance involves compromises that are not acceptable for an engine oil (which is a major reason why engine and gearbox lubes are different). So, even if this method had been validated (which it hasn't) and were performed in a rigorous way according to accepted standards (which it isn't), it would only tell us one aspect of an oil's performance, and that one aspect would be largely irrelevant to engines.

PF's evaporation loss test is okay for what it is, and the thought of testing aged oil is great. But at no point in an engine does the oil sit at that temp under atmospheric pressure for 2 hours, and real oil aging methods involve more than just high temps (e.g. bubbling NOx compounds through the oil and then loading it with soot). All he does to justify this method is name-drop the Noack volatility test, which is interesting but very narrow in its utility and works differently from how he did it.

PF's cold flow test also is not meaningful because cold oil doesn't just passively flow through an engine. It gets pumped, and pumping generates shear forces which change the apparent viscosity of the oil. That's why real cold viscosity tests, like the MRV and CCS testing that defines an engine oil's W rating (e.g. the 10W in 10W-60), involve shear forces.

PF describes TBN as the oil’s ability to neutralize acids deposited in the oil from combustion. Like all the tables, the greater the value, the better the oil will perform.

TBN retention is also important. Different oils and applications can deplete TBN at different rates, so the starting number alone doesn't say much. Also, like any oil additive, the ones that underpin TBN have both good and bad effects. Most TBN comes from calcium- and/or magnesium-based detergents, which have obvious benefits -- but they also compete with anti-wear additives and friction modifiers, and increase ash formation.

Same deal with anti-wear additives: there's more than one kind, they don't all work the same, and their performance depends on the rest of the formulation, so the "total" amount itself doesn't tell you anything about overall performance -- and high levels come with downsides as well as upsides. And even if the amount itself could tell you something, PF's "total antiwear additive PPM" numbers aren't reliable. The real numbers are proprietary, and he couldn't figure it out with oil analysis because not all additives show up, and the ones that do (e.g. ZDDP) don't always show up in the same way.

I appreciate that we're all trying to make decisions based on the information we have. But if we were to lean on criteria like PPM numbers, TBNs, etc., here's an example of where we'd end up: MPT Thirty-K. 100% PAO and ester base stocks, with ZERO group III or non-synthetic base stock -- not even as additive carriers. Hysterical amounts of ZDDP and detergents; they no longer list the numbers on the site but they were all 1000-1500+ ppm ZDDP and 2k-3k+ ppm detergent. Massive starting TBN, e.g. 12.5 for the 10W-60. These are all the things the Internet leads you to think you want. And yet, not a single OEM, big-boy engine builder, or major race team wants a piece of it. A lot of them use TWS, Helix Ultra Racing, Mobil 1, etc. -- the stuff Internet warriors and one-arm banditeers like to scoff at for weak "test" results and low PPM numbers.

Also, if you browse the spec handbook I linked above, you might notice there's very little in there about additive PPMs or starting TBNs. Virtually everything is about actual performance, not ingredients.

What limited data is worth basing a decision on? Well, for one thing... the people who developed the engine literally told us what oil they think we should use.

Beyond that, we're unfortunately in a crappy situation because BMW never published an actual lubricant spec for these engines. They and their lubrication partners (Castrol, then Shell) are the only ones who really know the details of what the engine needs, and they're never going to tell. Everyone else is just guessing.

Barring an OEM recommendation, and in the absence of an actual spec, the (distantly) next best thing is a track record of apparent success in real performance engines, ideally including yours. Liqui Moly is the obvious go-to here. If you like big additive PPM numbers on oil analysis, Motul 300V and Red Line's non-OE-approved lineup are no-brainers; Red Line might have more of a rep in S54s per se, while 300V has way more of a track record in high-end racing, for what that's worth. If impressive specs and credible promises of cutting-edge tech are more your thing, Ravenol seems like a good call.