Aaron European racing is very much a mixture of environments just like it is here in the US. I have never dealt with Karting in the EU but if the endurance WEC world is anything like it it just depends on what pit box you end up in.
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Good information, I think as a Club I am going to recommend ELF being the exclusive oil going forward from 2022. The main problem I have currently is the club allows 3 different oil options which simply makes it a hassle for the tech guys to test consistently between products.
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Just for my American friends. Outside of the bubble of CIK racing, no one in Europe cares all that much either.
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It looks like the troll wants to be fed.
Yeah I didn’t mean it literally, I just meant it as a comment about the way he was talking about other nationalities/ethnicities. The European guys I’ve personally met have all been super nice and have a good passion for the sport, which was nice to see.
I do couple races in uae for years and never see a European or Filipino complain about the weather (except sandstorms)
I use tu be behind the spanners in Alain or rak with 56degres so I know what it is.
My grammar ? Sorry to be able to speak and understand 5 differents languages and 6 if i brush my Chinese…
But I know that a Filipino gets 3000-5000 dirhams to work more than an European, they lives in Sharjah and not in the marina, jvc or arabian ranches…
Never saw a Filipino or whatever earn like an European (minimum 140000 for a standard and personally I use to be on 21000 back in 2016)
Felix,
If I’m running a National-level event, using the organizer’s $90 drum of unleaded racing fuel with a specific chemical signature and $30 bottle of Elf oil is not going to be worth worrying about relative to the $500 entry fee, $500 for two sets of tires, $400 for four nights in a hotel, $500 worth of driving to and from the event, $1000* mechanic’s fee, $1000+ worth of time-off from work and $500 worth of replacement and tuning parts needed to do it properly.
If, however, I’m running at a club or regional race, I’d expect to buy one $250 set of tires, to put up my one-man tent in Turn 4, to run as a two-man two-kart band with a friend, buy $15 worth of 93 AKI (98 RON) E10 fuel from a specific pump at a specific gas station near the track, and for economy’s sake to have the club specify an oil.
Yamaha and Honda developed the JASO FD standard for JALOS in order to make sure that oil companies made oils suitable for 400 hp/liter (50 hp 125cc/100 hp 250cc) production and Grand Prix racing bikes that ran at 13k RPM at peak power and hit 15k-16k on downshifts. Kart shops already sell Klotz Super Techniplate (which meets the standard - Snowmobile Techniplate’s been officially certified by JALOS) and Mystik Sea and Snow JT-4 is $5 per liter and JASO FD certified. 5% is 1 liter of oil per 20 liters of fuel, which is a little more than I use in a weekend.
*Might be more or less - depends on who the mechanic is!
(edited only to correct $100+ of time off from work to $1000+)
Charles
Iame recommends the oils I cited for the best durability of the X30, of which we have produced several thousand a year for over ten years and sell them to dozens of countries all around the world. We collect experience from racers at the professional level using expensive race fuel, and from amateurs in developing countries with very poor quality pump gas. We recommended certain lubricants because we gather sufficient data on countless races, every weekend, to be able to say they will optimize the durability and performance of our product.
As to your comparison between the cost of a quart of lubricant in relation to a national race where you stay in a hotel etc etc or a local race with inexpensive tires, etc etc - we look at it from a different perspective.
In our opinion it is worth to spend a few dollars more every time the engine is raced by using the recommended oils, to protect the engine from the sometimes catastrophic effects of poor lubrication. Sometimes you spend a few dollars more on a daily basis to extend the life of parts and protect yourself from a potentially huge unexpected bill
Actually, if you stay in an expensive hotel etc you can also probably afford an engine total rebuild, whilst if you are a club amateur it may blow your seasons budget.
So, since we don’t have enough data on the products you cite, we don’t recommend them.
On the other hand, we have a lot of experience with quite a few of the lubricants that are on the JASO FD list, or are approved by the CIK-FIA for kart racing. They are not all the same, and they perform very differently from each other, on IAME engines (not speaking for Honda or Yamaha). That is why we recommend the ones we do!
You are clearly free to avail yourself or not of our recommendation, but we would appreciate if you were cautious in recommending different products to others. They may be great with Iame engines, or awful, but it’s really difficult to establish sound conclusions with relatively few data points, compared to what we see every weekend and have seen over several years.
Thanks for racing with Iame and supporting our sport so passionately.
Felix
Had no idea a national event cost that much! Sounds like I need to either ramp up by selling more oranges at the freeway exit, or go find some sponsors. . .
It depends on the class and how much you’re really wanting to spend. In 206, even the Grand Nationals would be hard to run up more than $1,000 for the weekend before crash damages. For the X30 classes, SKUSA or USPKS events reach or even go higher than that total.
I run KA and running USPKS at Ocala, the furthest track on the schedule, with a chassis rental for the weekend was significantly less than what Charles listed for a price. There’s a lot of variables that will change how much you spend.
Felix,
You’ve convinced me to switch to the Elf HTX 909 in my X30 once my current bottle of Klotz Techniplate is empty, right at the next top-end overhaul. I was skeptical of IAME’s oil recommendations mostly because they were oils that weren’t available here or JASO certified. Nobody wants to go to a race and be handed a bottle of mandated WTFoil that’s clearly unsuitable (separates from the fuel, way too light, smells like canola), but it looks like IAME has done adequate testing and chosen something from a major oil company.
Let me also compliment IAME on finally getting the electronics right on the 2021 X30. It looks like a good electrical engineer designed the system from requirements, rather than having a mechanical engineer piece something together and tinker with it until it ran once.
Yes. That’s not what every national event costs, but is for an “away” one where travel & hotel costs match or exceed the at-the-track expenditure.
Dean, that’s not what a local CKNA event will cost. Your fee for the weekend will be $210 plus $170 for a set of tires, and of course you can stay at home or camp out.
Charles,
Yes, your X30’s bottom end will like the Elf lubrication. That’s where the biggest requirements lie, so don’t delay all too much.
On the electronics, we are dependent on our suppliers to do a good job, given our relatively small batch sizes we couldn’t possibly produce them in-house. Unfortunately over the last ten years many European suppliers have closed, as they could not compete with the low prices of the asian competitors. It’s not an easy problem to solve, as the asian companies are not interested in small production numbers. Glad you like the new system. You will probably like the new exhaust in one piece also. It’s user friendly and really improves parity, in particular for the junior class.
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I sat back and enjoyed this thread for while…
Having raced and “tuned” at the Euro level, and the US level (although I was older by then) I think that both paddocks have elitists who look down on club racing or 4 strokes or another country or continent. Both have mechanics who can’t handle hard work. Both have rip off teams and both have good value teams. It’s difficult to make a driver quality comparison, Supernats is really the only example and only the best European drivers turn up to that. If Europe did a temporary track which no one had tested at and (as an example) Norberg turned up I’m pretty sure he’d be up there. Usually the disadvantage going either way is learning the tracks and the tires and if you’ve grown up racing there of course you have an advantage.
Also, ELF HTX 909, I was using that in a Maxter KZ 15 years ago. It is excellent. I remember my engine tuner showing me this pink fuel and telling me this was the best oil he’d ever used (and he’d won multiple world and european championships at that point).
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@Felix_Rovelli, are you the world karting champion 1976 and 1977.
If so, in the presence of greatness!
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Wrong
Now he stay with strawberry in euro iame and rotax
Good to see OTK supporting a driver that won them a World Championship last year. Absolute joke this sport is sometimes at the top level.
Its always awesome to read your replies to posts, as your level of grammar and chemical / mechanical knowledge seem to be on the high end of the spectrum.
Regarding the usage of Elf 909 (and Wladoil), the oil is homologated under CIK - FIA specifications ( as previously stated, but see here for the complete list : https://www.fiakarting.com/sites/default/files/2021-04/lubrifiant2021_0.pdf) and have to abide by the following listed criteria / be tested by an independent lab : https://www.fiakarting.com/sites/default/files/2020-10/Reglement%20d'Agrement%202020.pdf
I will go out on a limb and say that any oil homologated by the CIK is perfectly usable with any and all 2 stroke kart racing engines, from PRD Fireball to an OK built for the final of a World Championship.
Simone,
It looks like the CIK requires that:
- The oil boils at >250*C
- No metallic anti-detonation additives are included in the oil
- Fuel octane is not increased or decreased by the addition of the oil.
None of those are measurements of lubricating ability! I think any old 50-weight mineral oil would meet the CIK-FIA requirements if submitted, but you wouldn’t want to run “Super Tech” oil from the local Wal-Mart in your X30. That’s why Felix Rovelli recommended Elf HTX 909 specifically instead of just “any CIK-FIA approved oil” or “any JASO-FD oil”
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