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Caterham Recommended Oils and Fluids.


Titanium7

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During my 9 years of ownership of 4 different cars Caterham seem to have changed their recommended Lubricant suppliers at least 3 times. Comma, Millers and now Motul.

In my new Seven owner's handbook it has a large Motul Sticker crudely stuck in covering the printed previous recommended Miller information.

Do you think Caterham change suppliers for commercial partnership reasons or purely technical or both?  

 

 

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I would speculate that, since CC buy a reasonable quantity of oils for new kits, factory build, as well as their own workshop which services a wide age range of cars, the decision is most likely commercial.  However, any supplier change will be backed up with appropriate due diligence on performance. If the selection was purely lubricant performance based, it would be unlikely that one supplier would always have the best oils for the Ford engine, Mazda box, and BMW diff.

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I doubt there’s any other than a commercial reason, that is, they'll recommend whoever pays most.  

Given that all of the brands and grades they recommend have been around for several years, any kind of due diligence should have led to consistency; if brand A was better than B or C 4 years ago (when they recommended Comma) the same should be true now. 

I also doubt that Caterham are capable of technical testing themselves and the brands and grades they recommend are simply certified to certain standards. 

To be fair, I expect most car manufacturers aren’t much different. 

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I think we all agree that whoever CC recommend it will be commercially linked (as per most OEM’s)  but they certainly won’t be giving prominence to a chip shop oil supplier.  For my engine, box, and diff, I made my own choices based on my own studies, but best not to go off topic with a “who makes the best oil thread” as it would never end.

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I believe Motul have recently become the supplier to Ford  - Ford branded oils are Motul. Perhaps that is coincidence, or a marketing push, but Comma was in a similar position at one time. It is likely that as a supplier of new Ford engines they are just following the flow.

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Millers everyday of the week.  In my 1.8VVC kmaps I am using Millers Oils NANODRIVE CFS 10w-60 NT+ Based on tests done by Dave at Gemzoe Motorsport, more performance, less wear , better cooling 

yes it takes a bit a warming up but oil pressure is much better even on track 

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Don't forget all the current "recommended" oils are what are considered by many to be the lower quality end products.

Comma was a reclaimed oil product when it first came out.

Probably best to stick with the better quality products like Mobil, Castrol, Valvoline , etc.

As many of the previous posts have realised, it is 100% purely a cost driven exercise, to recommend the lower quality suppliers.

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Anyone who follows the Duratec in Detail blog may recall I did some back to back tests on the dyno and you can get more power with Millers NT. But it's swings and roundabouts, and an increase in a few BHP (~3 bhp IIRC) was at the the cost of increased wear rates and other issues.

Basically on a stable one year old engine I counted the particles on a filter segment under a microscope.  At that time I didn't rate Millers that highly and the NT version seemed to have the highest particle count. That test engine went on to fail for reasons that were not totally oil related but the cam bearing wear was not normal, and the reduced damping action certainly contributed to a valve spring  failure.  

A few years on and I do used Millers as first choice but at a higher viscosity (10W60). That is a first class oil in terms of wear and there's no significant power loss.  Whether NT is a figment of marketing imagination or not, the easiest way to reduce friction is by means of the viscosity of the oil. If NT is real, then using it as a mechanism to obtain a viscosity rating is something I would not choose.

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