There's enough of this Richmond summer left that you want to make sure your engine oil is up to the challenge.

Engine oil is critical any time of year but no more so than when Richmond temperatures are at a summer-time peak. Too much heat is a problem for engines – a big problem. And oil is the defensive system that preserves engines.

Even in the middle of a Richmond winter, your vehicle’s engine gets hot – real hot. On the coldest days, cars can overheat. And long before it overheats, the temperature inside the engine is enough that you can bake with it.

You know it gets hot inside the engine in winter because you can feel the evidence. The evidence comes to you in the form of heat from the vents when you want to stay warm. Of course, this time of year, you’re not looking for heat to keep you warm. This is another reason summer is harder on your engine.

In the winter, when you turn on the heat inside the car, that heat is carried by the coolant/antifreeze through the heater coil. The fan blows air through the coil and the air picks up heat as it passes through. That heat keeps you warm. But, at the same time, it’s removing heat from the engine.

In the summer, when you don’t need that heat, the heater core isn’t there to dissipate heat into the air filling the cabin. The is carried away when the fan in front of the engine pulls air through the radiator.

In the meantime, your engine oil is hard at work reducing the heat in the engine. It does so by reducing friction.

It’s no surprise to say that oil is slippery. Of course, it is. That’s one of the essential elements of what oil does in an engine. It makes sure that moving parts within the engine slide a bit as they rub against each other.

If you ran your engine without engine oil, in a relatively short amount of time, the heat would become so intense that the moving parts would fuse together and, instead of a mechanical device, you’d have a block of molten metal waiting to cool down into an iron anchor.

Now, when you consider that you won’t remove heat from the engine through the heater core, and that the temperature outside isn’t helping any, the engine oil is that much more critical. It’s critical that the engine oil is operating at its peak performance.

The way to ensure that your engine oil is doing its job is to make sure that you change the oil in a timely fashion. Check your owner’s manual and change the oil when prescribed. Doing so will give your engine oil that is clean (the oil also carries away dirt from between moving parts) and has the maximum ability to lubricate those moving parts.

Richmond summers will get hot. Make sure your engine oil is up to the task.