Why Your Next Performance Upgrade Should Be Your Car's Oiling System

Drive a few HPDEs or drag races and it won’t take long to figure out that your car’s performance bottlenecks aren’t really about power or torque—they’re about oiling.

A built small-block with bonkers power that can’t keep itself properly lubricated at the track is about as useful as a turbo that only builds boost just as you’re reaching redline; there’s potential there, but you can’t realize it. To get the most out of your engine, lap after lap or pass after pass, you’re going to need to upgrade your oiling system.

Established in a small Connecticut garage back in 1981, Canton Racing Products started off making specialty oil pans for local racers, and the company’s portfolio has grown substantially ever since. Today, Canton continues to manufacture high-performance oil pans for road and race cars, but it also carries an impressive selection of alloy oil and coolant tanks, high-performance oil and fuel filters, oil system adapters, and its trademark Accusump oil reservoir system.

What makes an oil pan any more “high-performance” than any other? It’s all about controlling the oil’s pressure and flow to the pickup. Ordinary road cars don’t tend to routinely test the limits of their factory oiling systems, but in race cars and high-performance street machines, it’s a different story.

That’s why Canton Racing Products throws every trick in the book at their oil pans, incorporating track-proven features like trap doors and slosh baffles to keep the oil from being pushed against one wall of the pan under hard g-forces, crank scrapers and power pouches to strip excess oil away from the rotating assembly and keep it from weighing down the crank, and windage trays to keep the motion of the crank and pistons from whipping the oil up and impacting scavenging.

Simply put, Canton’s Accusump oil reservoir system takes oil control to the next level. You may have heard of the benefits of a dry sump lubrication system, but such setups are so expensive that, unless you truly need one, you’d be better served spending your money elsewhere – like an Accusump system. Accusump represents the next best thing to dry sump lubrication, with a pressurized oil reservoir that steps in when needed, discharging extra oil into the sump whenever there’s an interruption in supply.

That could be during a cold start, before your engine’s oil has really started circulating, or during a road race, when hard cornering forces have pulled oil away from the pickup. Ordinarily, just a few seconds under those conditions is about all it takes to wear your rod bearings or score your cylinder walls. But with one, two, or three quarts of oil in reserve and ready to go at a moment’s notice, you’re protected.

Of course, ensuring your engine has sufficient oil supply is one thing; keeping that oil clean enough to do its job is quite another. That’s where products like Canton’s high-performance filters come in. The company offers a range of beautiful billet aluminum oil filters with replaceable high-performance elements and sealing rings, designed for maximum capacity and flow, to help your oil keep up with the rigors of regular track use.

Many of those filters are the threaded OE-style screw-on type for direct replacement, but others employ a remote or in-line design, opening the door to plenty of customization. Helping with this is Canton’s extensive line of sandwich- and remote-style adapters and filter block-off plates, machined from billet aluminum for years of reliable service.

Further expanding your customization options, Canton Racing Products even carries a range of aluminum oil, coolant, and power steering tanks, with top-quality construction and provisions like baffles and oil runners where appropriate to help maintain a consistent, reliable supply of fluid. The range includes a mix of universal-fit and model-specific tanks to serve as many builds as possible.

Apart from their functionality, one thing many of these parts share in common is their serious aesthetic appeal. Simply put, a professionally TIG-welded coolant reservoir just looks better than any cheap plastic tank out there. The same can be said of Canton’s billet oil filters, which are works of art next to the typical off-the-shelf disposable oil filter. Whether you care about such things or not probably depends on whether you’re building an eye-catching restomod or a dedicated drift or race car, but either way, Canton Racing Products has you covered.