I have been a proponent of ester synthetic oils for a long time now. Recently, RedLine came out with a line of motorcycle oils. I have been running RedLine in my trucks for decades, so I decided to give their motorcycle oil a try.....

http://www.redlineoil.com/prod...oil.asp?categoryID=11


Note that this is subjective and based on the "seat of the pants" feel (I have not verified it on the dyno), but I am seeing a noticeable increase in horsepower!!! In particular, the engines will rev up more quickly. This is true of all my quads....you can see the list below.

This oil is friction modified, yet it will not make a wet clutch slip. (No, not even autoclutch manual trannies with centrifugal clutches like the Rancher, 250EX, or 90!). I think that is where the horsepower increase is coming from!!!

Those of you who are astute students of oil, will notice that RedLine is JASO MB. The usual rule is that JASO MA oils are safe for wet clutches, and friction modified MB oils are reserved for the engine side only of the Honda 450R quad and Honda 450/250/150 dirt bikes, where the engine and trans oils are seperated. It took me a lot of digging to get this info out of RedLine, but this oil contains proprietary synthetic friction modifiers that don't fit into any existing JASO catagory! Therefore, this oil has to be called MB...yet it is safe for wet clutches. There may very well be a JASO MC classification coming in the future, to account for this type of friction modifier!

 

......and, if you don't think oil can effect horsepower, check out the "dyno" section of this aritcle:

http://www.sportrider.com/tech/146_0310_oil/index.html


They got horsepower gains in street bikes from both Maxima Ultra and Motul 300V, which are not surprisingly also ester synthetics!!! Do note however, that they were using very thin oils like 0W30 to reduce fluid drag (that the average rider would only use in extremely cold weather). All my experiences so far have been with RedLine 10W40 only.