Originally Posted By: donnyj08
many M1 UOA's here aside from 0w40 are less than fantastic. they are decent, but not fantastic. yet we have seen many fantastic UOA's from The super line. 2010_fx4's UOA's come to mind here, as well as my own UOA with this very oil.
Im Not intending to say the super is superior to M1, my point is that it has shown to control wear just as well as M1, PU, or any other lube that you could compare it too, assuming the conditions that most people drive under.
perhaps in a racing or heavy towing application M1 would protect much better than the super line, but i have yet to see proof of that. Just because mobil markets M1 as the superior oil doesn not mean that it is in fact superior in all applications.
perhaps my choice of words should have been that MSS performs just as well as mobil 1 in my experience.
This assumes that what we see in a UOA is a legitimate reflection of wear. I don't believe that is necessarily the case. While there are indeed times where a UOA may potentially alert you to a wear issue, their intended use is to track oil life and contamination. One needs only to look at the condemnation limits used by Doug Hillary in his 90,000Km OCI's for his UOA's (150ppm of iron for example) and contrast these to his tear-down pictures (liner "like new", bearings still within spec....etc) at 1.2 million Km's to see the potential folly in relying on these numbers to guide us in thinking our efforts are working to track and control the wear characteristics of our engines.