Oil pans and sumps may appear simplistic at face value, but when you start getting into the demanding environment of the race track —whether it be the road course or the drag strip, packaging and design become very specialized. Canton Racing products is always evolving their offerings to keep up with the trends and demands racers drive. Their oil pans can be found on race cars far and wide and across the gamut of motorsports.

The LS Next line of pans takes advantage of the un-skirted block design of the new Dart blocks. These high-end pans are constructed from thick .100-inch aluminum and are hand TIG-welded for a high level of craftsmanship. Developing these pans for different applications requires examining the specific forces a respective race car will experience in the heat of racing, specifically the direction of common G-loads.

“We’ve been hammering out our design on the LS Next line, it’s proven to be quite a headache but we’re confident it’s going to be a solid product. We have four products right now; a front-sump version of an oil pan, a rear-sump road-race version, a rear-sump drag version, and a dry sump,” explained Jeff Behuniak of Canton. “I guess you could say we’re re-R&Ding them, we came out with them and a trend shifted — now guys are using double rollers and that’s changed everything. We actually had to modify one of the caps because the oil pump moves obviously, we had to clearance 1.5-2 inches.”

How Canton goes about creating a racing oil pan is a combination of balancing factors. The list of features may vary slightly between models but the end goal is always the same, to maintain positive pressure at the pickup no matter what the driver is doing.

“There are a bunch of basic features you try to build into a pan, whether that’s extra capacity, crank scrapers or anything like that — the biggest difference between a drag racing pan and a road-racing pan is our diamond-shaped baffle. Instead of covering just front-to-back, like would be in our drag racing pan, you have to have side-to-side. In drag racing we try to put the pickup towards the back becuase the engine is experiencing mostly acceleration and the trap doors keep pretty much all the oil back when you brake. In a road-race pan we try to keep it as close to the center as possible,” Behuniak conveyed.

Adapting to the evolving marketplace trends and racing schools of though keeps suppliers like Canton on their toes, getting too comfortable in one design is a sure way to get left in the dust. Avoiding this, Canton maintains an active relationship with the community, taking the pulse of engine-building fads or developments.

“The R&D process depends on who brings us the idea and what we have available. With the LS Next in particular, we had been in contact with Dart for a while and eventually they sent us a prototype. We built the dimensions off our common LS pan but the rail was way different,” recalled Behuniak. The latest iteration of the Canton LS Next pan is rolling off the welding bench and should become available soon, thanks to Canton for a sneak peak into their process. “It was not a difficult re-design, it was just frustrating to go through the whole thing and then find out we had to make changes,” concluded Behuniak.