Penrite Oil

Company Description

In March of 1979 Roberta sold the business to John Dymond, who at the time was Victorian manager of Lubrizol, an American-based additive company and one of Penrite's suppliers. John left school at 16 to do an apprenticeship at Vauxhall Motors in his native Luton, about 50 kilometres north of London. The apprenticeship lasted seven years, and he got a mechanical engineer's degree at night school. At the end of his apprenticeship he applied for a job with B.P. Australia and moved Down Under in 1958, at the age of 27. His fiancee, Margaret, came with him, and the two Penrite Oilre married at St Peter's in Box Hill in September 1958. In 1967 John took the position at Lubrizol, where he remained until he purchased Penrite. John developed Penrite's signature high performance range (HPR) oil, and under his leadership Penrite became involved in historic racing, a sport dear to his heart. "We make it, we prove it" was John's motto, and it has stood Penrite's drivers in good stead.


Penrite continued from strength to strength in its Brunswick East premises until 1997, when John decided it had outgrown its inner-city factory location and moved the business to Wantirna South, where its headquarters is today. John died in 2006, and Margaret took over the company, which is one of the oldest wholly Australian owned corporations in the country. Several of the Dymond children still work at Penrite, continuing the family business and creating the better class of oil that Penrite has developed for 85 years.