This is Your Engine Oil and This is Your Engine Oil on Drugs

In a recent The Motor Oil Geek YouTube channel episode, the host of the show does an impressive demonstration he referred to as, “This is your oil, this is your oil on boost” after performing oil analysis looking at how motor oil can be affected when an engine is boosted with a turbocharged system. While this pertains primarily to racecar designed engines, it is informative toward making engines and what is going on under the hood, understandable to the lay car owner.

What is Boost?

Basically boost is what you want in today’s smaller engine cars to ensure that while in traffic you can get the pickup and go you need occasionally to either pass another vehicle like a long hauler or reach escape velocity when you find yourself in a merging lane and that merging vehicle is approaching you dangerously close because he or she will not back off or respect the solid white line.

Boost is achieved by physically forcing more air into a car’s engine to cause the fuel in the cylinders to burn more effectively and efficiently, which results in more power i.e., boost to your engine.

Before turbocharging in today’s cars, engines were naturally aspirated meaning that the air entering the engine is under the same pressure as your atmospheric pressure you and your car breathe in.

At some point when engineers were experimenting with improving the air intake of cars, a supercharger system was tried.

What is a Supercharger?

A supercharger is a vehicle fitted with an air compressor that actively pushes more air (thus more oxygen) into the intake manifold and then on into the engine cylinders.

The supercharger was powered by a belt from the engine crankshaft, which spun components within the supercharger creating a vacuum that pulled and then squeezed more air (thus more oxygen) into the engine than was possible in a naturally aspirated engine.

However, a supercharger steals some horsepower from the engine. A better solution was the development of turbo chargers that did not steal horsepower from the engine by using exhaust gases to recirculate from the engine into the turbine of a turbocharger feeding the intake manifold. Coupled with a direct fuel injection system, this resulted in more power and better fuel efficiency.

Examples of today’s cars include Ford’s line of vehicles with the 4-cylinder, 1.0 liter to 3.5-liter EcoBoost engines that are much lighter than their earlier engines and produce as much power with the turbo system as their heavier, higher cylinder numbered engines of the past.

Related article: Ford EcoBoost Engine Oil Breakdown Problem

What Happens to Oil When Boost is Applied

In the demonstration from The Motor Oil Geek YouTube channel episode, the host shows that in a racecar engine designed to receive more boost than what is achieved in a commercial stock vehicle today, is that via the combination of increased air and increased fuel, the resulting effect is lowering of the motor oil viscosity and prematurely breaking the oil down, which results in increased wear and tear on the engine.

Related article: The Truth About Turbo Engine Reliability from This Car Shopping Expert

Furthermore, he demonstrates―not surprisingly―temperature plays a significant role in how the oil is adversely affected and is also affected by the increase of water contamination resulting in the oil; both of which can be mitigated by how the engine is operated.

Related article: Blown Turbo at Only 60,000 Miles on This Chevy. What Happened?

The Value of This Video

The value of this video is that it is instructive in how differing oil viscosities under a range of differing running conditions can and will affect motor oil when an engine (whether a racecar type or your family car) is pushed to its limits. The data charts shown will also help you interpret and understand what is significant should you ever decide to have a sample of your engine oil analyzed.

Oh yes, and then there’s watching the dyno run. I can never get enough of that.

What Boost Did to Our 5W-30 Motor Oil...

Timothy Boyer is an automotive reporter based in Cincinnati. Experienced with early car restorations, he regularly restores older vehicles with engine modifications for improved performance. Follow Tim on Twitter at @TimBoyerWrites  and Facebook for daily news and topics related to new and used cars and trucks.

Image source: Deposit Photos