If you’re building a high-performance engine, producing power is probably your number one focus. However, given how much money goes into such a project and all of the expensive hardware that it ends up moving down the road, protecting the parts in that engine should also be high on your list of priorities.

MAHLE Motorsports’ Gold Series coating is designed to do just that for a variety of cylinder bores, including aluminum-silicon (Al-Si), MMC, and FRM.

Cylinders like those have running surfaces of exposed fibers and crystals over an aluminum base and offer such advantages as reduced friction, a greater ability to resist wear, and improved conductivity when compared to cast iron and steel units.

The Gold Series coating is a screen-printed organic resin layer which contains iron and steel particles that’s applied to a piston skirt, typically at a thickness of 12 microns. The fuel and oil-resistant mixture protects the skirt from scuffing in narrow clearance and lack of lubrication scenarios. In fact, the protection a product such as the Gold Series coating provides is required in Al-Si bores. Otherwise, it’s highly likely scuffing of the piston skirts and cylinder seizures will occur. Not exactly the things you want to happen when you’re blasting down the road in your project car at questionably legal speeds.

Perhaps the best part of the MAHLE Motorsports’ Gold Series coating is that it’s been engineered to last the life of the piston that it’s applied to, not just the break-in period for it. That means years of service or thousands of miles of high-rpm smiles.