If you'd have asked most performance enthusiasts back in the muscle-car heyday what would become of the woeful Poly 318 in 25 years time, most would have said it wouldn't exist. And even the hardest core MOPAR enthusiast would have laughed in your face if you'd told him the Poly 318 would eventually evolve into one of the greatest -- and largest -- American engines ever produced: the V-10 Dodge put in the Ram and Viper.
The Dodge V-10 has always had fairly simple needs. The V-10 evolved from the 5.7-liter Magnum V-8, which was essentially a retooled, LA-series 360 V-8. The 360 LA was an evolution of the earlier Poly 318 A-series engine -- a boat anchor from a performance perspective, but designed for reliability. The LA-series 360 and the Magnum-series engines that followed used "wedge" heads instead of the "polyspherical" head that gave the Poly its name. This combination of wedge heads and old-school, truck-engine design made the V-10 a reliable and potent performer.
For Ram trucks, Chrysler specifies 7 quarts of basic SAE 10W-40 oil. You can go to a 10W-30 for operating temperatures over 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and as light as 5W-30 in winter conditions that never top freezing. Viper owners will often go for a more expensive full synthetic like Mobil 1 -- not because the Viper actually needs it, according to Dodge, but more because putting cheap dinosaur oil in a supercar famously run at Le Mans by the Mobil 1-sponsored Team Oreca just seems wrong.
