AMSOIL-Sponsored Dirt Bike Racing

Hey, today we’re doing some dirt bike clutch testing. All right, we’re testing dirt bike oil today, but specifically we’re looking at clutch frictional characteristics. Why are we using the old bike? Because it has a separate engine and transmission sump, which means we can focus solely on the transmission.

Then a dirt bike gets very specific how the lever feels, especially when you’re going to do like a gate start and racing. We found that’s one of the most extreme forms of testing that we could actually do to the oil. So we’re working a candidate formulation here today. And what we’re actually doing is the clutch plates are currently soaking in the formulation.

So that way they get nice and soaked. The fluid has a chance to get very much embedded into the plates. We’re going to put these plates in, then we’re going to run our extreme start test. So the results are in.

This is the clutch laid out as it came out of the bike. So when we let the clutch out on that start, it starts to engage here. It engages through all the way towards the center of the motorcycle. So what we traditionally see here is where on these clutch plates.

These are the steels, these are the frictionals. So what we’re looking for here is where, smearing, missing parts. Any place where the lines have disappeared that would indicate the clutch was slipping would be a sign of a failure of that clutch, which means the fluid is possibly slipping too much. In the case of a bad clutch, this is an example of one that actually failed, where you can see everything is all smeared together on here.

This clutch didn’t hold anymore. This clutch survived the test and it looks good. We would consider this a pass. Well there you have it, a little inside look at some of the testing we do here at AMSOIL.

A couple things to note here, we understand that we consider this an extreme start test. And understanding that in a true gate start, you’re going to deal with wheel spin, wheel lift, throttle variation. There’s many variables that go into it. One nice thing on the dyno is we can remove a lot of that, but it also does add stress to the clutch plates since we don’t have any wheel spin.

We understand that and we’re doing that on purpose. We’re creating an extreme environment here to be sure that the dirt bike oil is protecting in a way that we want it to in extreme situations, but also continuing to provide the very progressive lever feel. So this was an experimental formulary we were working with today. The next step for this particular formulary will be full-on engine testing.

We do this testing because dirt bikes are constantly changing. Oil formulary is constantly changing, so we’re always searching for a new and better way to provide you the rider a way to stay protected out on the trail. That way you’re spending more time riding, less time working on the bike. For more information about any of our dirt bike products, check out msoil.com.