Trains, heavy machinery and a measure of castor oil.

Castrol begins with a man rather than a product. On its heritage pages, the company says it was founded by Charles “Cheers” Wakefield under the name CC Wakefield & Company. In 1899, the company says, Wakefield left a job at Vacuum Oil to start a new business selling lubricants for trains and heavy machinery. English Wikipedia places that new business in Cheapside, London, and says eight Vacuum Oil employees went with him.

The early customers were railways and industry, but the new century brought new machines. In the early 1900s, according to Castrol’s own history, the company developed lubricants especially suited to automobiles and aeroplanes. Its researchers, the company says, found that adding a measured amount of castor oil, a vegetable oil pressed from castor beans, gave them what they needed. The new product was named for that ingredient: Castrol. English Wikipedia dates the company’s launch of a lubricant to 1906; the company itself places the Castrol name in the early 1900s.

The aviation story is one the company tells with pride. Castrol says that in 1919 the aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown chose Castrol to lubricate the engine of their aircraft for their nonstop crossing of the Atlantic. The company presents that flight as an early sign of the brand moving with the frontier of engineering, from railway yards to the air.

Wakefield also understood visibility. According to the company’s history, he put the Castrol name on banners and flags at competitive aviation events, motor races and attempts on the land speed record. The company credits him with pioneering that kind of sponsorship,, and motorsport has remained central to how the brand is seen.

By 1960, the company says, the name of the motor oil had all but eclipsed that of its larger-than-life founder, and CC Wakefield & Company became, simply, Castrol Ltd. It is an unusual reversal in brand history. The product name, made from a single ingredient, became the corporate name, and the founder’s name dropped out of the sign above the door.

Burmah, BP and a new majority owner.

Ownership changed three times in the following decades. In 1966, according to the company and to English Wikipedia, the Burmah Oil Company bought Castrol, and the combined business became Burmah-Castrol. In 2000, Burmah-Castrol was purchased by BP, which was then called BP Amoco. Wikipedia says Burmah’s operations were folded into the group, while Castrol remained as a subsidiary of BP and kept its own name on its products.

Under BP, the company says, Castrol added new ranges well beyond the car engine. Its history lists the Marine Bio range in 2008, a Castrol grease used on NASA’s Curiosity rover, which began its mission on Mars in 2012, and a bio-synthetic engine oil in 2017. The company also describes recent work on metalworking fluids, transmission fluids for electric cars and digital joint ventures, including online booking of car services.

The next change was agreed in December 2025. On a page in its newsroom, Castrol says that bp has agreed to sell a 65% shareholding in Castrol to Stonepeak, and that, subject to the necessary approvals, it expects the sale to be completed by the end of 2026. The news agency IANS reported the agreement on 24 December 2025, adding that BP would continue to hold a minority stake in Castrol through a joint venture structure. Castrol’s newsroom page describes the deal as an opportunity for the brand to grow through accelerated investment and a more independent ownership model.

Castrol is not run the same way in every market. English Wikipedia describes Wakefield Canada, a Canadian-owned company founded in 2005 and headquartered in Toronto, as the exclusive manufacturer, marketer and steward of the Castrol brand in Canada. It says Wakefield blends, packages and distributes Castrol lubricants there, as well as products under its own Wakefield name.

The product line has its own long-lived names. English Wikipedia lists Edge, Magnatec and GTX among Castrol’s passenger-car engine oils and Power 1 among its motorcycle oils, alongside commercial-vehicle oils and transmission fluids under separate names.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make motor oils, lubricants and performance parts: the fluids that go into an engine and the components that enthusiasts and workshops fit to cars, from ignition and fuel parts to brakes and suspension. Brands in this trade sit at many different points, from founding families whose surname is still on the product to names that now belong to oil majors, industrial groups or listed holding companies, and a single name can be sold on a supermarket shelf, in a parts store and on a race car.

A motor-oil or parts brand’s identity is usually carried by a can, a box, a colour and a sticker on a racing livery, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name on the side of the car.

Motorsport is where most people have met the Castrol name. English Wikipedia lists the brand as a supplier to a long run of Formula One teams, including Williams from 1997 to 2005, Renault and later Alpine from 2017 to 2025, and Audi from 2026. In rallying, it says, Castrol has sponsored the Ford World Rally Team and M-Sport since 2003, and it sponsored BMW Motorsport from 1999 to 2014.

In North America the name is tied to drag racing. Wikipedia says Castrol sponsored John Force Racing under the GTX brand in NHRA drag racing from 1987 until the end of the 2014 season, and that Castrol is the name sponsor of Castrol Raceway in Edmonton, Alberta. Those liveries carried the brand’s colours at speed, in front of grandstands and television cameras, for decades.

That is the same idea Charles Wakefield used when he put the name on banners at early air shows and record attempts, as the company tells it. The sponsorship habit runs from those flags to the side panels of modern rally and racing cars, and the product name has been the constant throughout.

The corporate story has an unusual shape for a design guide. A founder named his company after himself, named a product after an ingredient, and then saw the product name replace his own. Two later owners, Burmah and BP, each kept the Castrol name rather than replacing it with their own, and the 2025 agreement with Stonepeak, according to the company, is framed around giving the brand more independence rather than less.

For a design guide, Castrol shows how a single product word, used consistently across packaging, sponsorship and corporate life, can carry a brand through more than a century of changing owners. Compare Mobil, another oil name built on a strong mark, and Valvoline, an American lubricant brand with its own nineteenth-century founder story. For this guide we use a deep green, a signal red and a near-black with a heavy sans-serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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