Castrol PowerUp 4.0 · 4th Edition · 1st Year MBAs Only
The case is already live. Results are out by 1st August. This is the fastest PPI shot of the season.
Castrol PowerUp is one of the most under discovered corporate case competitions in the Indian MBA calendar. Small eligible campus list, two clean tracks in Sales and Marketing and Supply Chain, a ₹1,50,000 prize pool, and PPI opportunities for Summer Internship 2027. The case study is already open under the Challenges tab, so you can start today. This guide covers everything, the eligibility, the tracks, what past editions looked like, and how to build a submission that converts.
Register first, then read the guide
Registration is open now
PowerUp 4.0 runs on Castrol's own bp events platform, not on Unstop or InsideIIM. That single detail is worth noticing. The competitions hosted on the big aggregator platforms pull tens of thousands of registrations. This one sits behind a direct bp event link shared through campus placement committees and Castrol recruiters, which is exactly why the applicant pool stays small relative to the reward on offer.
🛢️ Castrol PowerUp 4.0 · 1st Year MBA
Register on the bp events portal
The case study is already live under the Challenges tab once you are in, so you can read the brief before you commit. Register, open the case, then decide.
₹1,50,000 total prize pool across the two tracks, plus Pre-Placement Interview opportunities for Summer Internship 2027. In past editions, national winners have gone on to intern with Castrol.
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Who can apply
1st year MBA students only, from a short list of eligible campuses that differs by track. If your campus is not on the list for your track, you are not eligible this year.
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The timeline
All rounds finish and results are announced by 1st August. This is one of the quickest corporate case competitions in the calendar, which means the effort is concentrated and the payoff arrives before your term gets heavy.
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The two tracks
Sales & Marketing and Supply Chain. You pick one. The eligible campus list is different for each, so check yours before you plan a team.
Eligibility, read this carefully
Two tracks, two different campus lists
This is the part most students get wrong. PowerUp does not open both tracks to the same set of campuses. Check your institute against your track before you build a team or start on the case.
Track 1
Sales & Marketing
The commercial side of the lubricants business. Expect briefs around channel strategy, distributor and mechanic ecosystems, brand building in a low involvement category, premiumisation, pricing, and how a legacy automotive brand stays relevant as vehicles and buying behaviour change.
The operations and distribution engine behind the brand. Expect briefs around network design, warehousing and inventory, primary and secondary distribution, cost to serve, demand planning, and sustainability in a physical goods supply chain.
Six campuses on one track and four on the other, restricted to 1st years only. Compare that with the flagship competitions that open to 140 plus institutes and both years. Your odds here are structurally better than almost anything else running this month. That is the whole argument for spending a weekend on it.
Some context on the competition
Three editions in, and still flying under the radar
Castrol has been running PowerUp for a few years now, and the pattern across editions has stayed remarkably consistent. Two tracks, Sales and Marketing plus Supply Chain, 1st year MBAs only, and a funnel that ends with national winners and runners up being recognised by Castrol and bp leadership. Past national winners have come from XLRI Jamshedpur, IIM Mumbai, IIT Bombay SJMSOM and SIBM Pune, based on publicly shared accounts from the students themselves.
Castrol's own communication around the third edition mentioned that the prior year had drawn over 650 teams from top B-schools across India. That number sounds large until you divide it across two tracks and remember that the eligible campus list this year is tighter than the messaging suggests. The competition is also visibly a talent pipeline exercise for Castrol. bp's early talent leadership has publicly described PowerUp as a launchpad rather than a competition, and at least one recent national winner in the Supply Chain track went on to intern with Castrol.
The practical takeaway. Treat PowerUp as a recruiting process wearing a case competition costume. Everything you submit is read by people who will later decide whether to interview you for a summer internship. That changes how you write.
The rounds, what to expect
A short funnel, built to close inside a few weeks
Castrol does not publish a formal rulebook the way the aggregator platforms do, and the exact round names change between editions. What has held steady across editions, and what the compressed timeline to 1st August tells you, is a three stage funnel. Here is the structure to plan against, with what each stage actually tests. Always confirm the current dates on the bp event portal, that page is the single source of truth.
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Stage 1 · Live now
Registration and case release
You register on the bp events portal and the case study opens immediately under the Challenges tab. There is no quiz, no aptitude test, no elimination gate before you see the brief. This is unusually generous. Most competitions make you clear an MCQ round before showing you anything real, PowerUp puts the actual business problem in front of you on day one so you can judge the fit yourself.
Read the case fully before you form the team. The brief tells you whether the problem is closer to consumer marketing, channel economics or network design, and that should decide who you pull onto the team rather than the other way around.
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Stage 2 · Main submission
The case solution submission, usually a deck
This is the round that does almost all of the filtering. You submit a structured solution to the released brief, typically as a slide deck within a stated page or slide limit, sometimes with a short executive summary. Evaluators are Castrol business and functional leaders, not consultants, so they read for practicality, commercial sense and whether your numbers hold up, more than for framework elegance.
Build the deck around one recommendation that a Castrol regional manager could actually action next quarter. Anything that needs a new business unit, a five year transformation or an unnamed technology partner will get skipped. Specific, costed and doable beats visionary here.
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Stage 3 · Final presentation
Presentation to the Castrol jury
Shortlisted teams present live to a panel of Castrol and bp leaders, typically virtually given the speed of the funnel, with a strict time limit and a heavy question and answer segment. National winners and runners up are announced from this round, and this is also where PPI conversations begin. Results are announced by 1st August.
The Q&A is the real evaluation. Line managers will poke at your assumptions on volumes, margins, distributor incentives or lead times. Have a backup slide for every number you quote, and be honest when something is an estimate. Saying this is our assumption and here is why lands far better than bluffing a precise figure.
On dates and formats
Castrol runs this on its own portal, so the details sit inside the event page
Round names, submission templates, slide limits and deadlines for PowerUp 4.0 are published inside the bp event portal after you register, not on a public listing page. Register early purely so you can see the fine print in time. Screenshot every deadline and every submission confirmation, and check the portal at least twice a week until 1st August.
What is on the table
₹1.5 lakh in prizes, and the internship pathway underneath it
🏆 Total prize pool
₹1,50,000
Shared across winners and runners up in both the Sales and Marketing and Supply Chain tracks. The split by position is confirmed on the event portal.
💼 The real prize
PPI for Summer Internship 2027
Pre-Placement Interview opportunities with Castrol for Summer Internship 2027. For a 1st year, converting a PPI before the campus summer process even starts changes the whole season.
🌱 The quiet benefit
Visibility with bp and Castrol leaders
Your final presentation is watched by senior functional leaders. Past participants have used that exposure for referrals and conversations well after the competition closed.
How to actually win this
What a Castrol jury rewards
Castrol sells a physical, low involvement, high frequency product through a long distribution chain into a market where the vehicle parc itself is changing. The people reading your deck live inside that reality every day. A submission that shows you understand the business will beat a submission that shows you understand a framework.
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Learn the lubricants business before you touch a slide
Understand how the value chain works, base oil and additives into blending plants, into distributors, into retailers, workshops, mechanics and bazaar traders, and finally into a vehicle. Know the difference between the personal mobility, commercial vehicle and industrial segments. One hour on this will show up on every slide.
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Respect the mechanic and the distributor
In this category the influencer at the point of sale often matters more than the end consumer. Mechanics, workshop owners and retailers drive brand choice. Any Sales and Marketing recommendation that ignores channel incentives and the influencer ecosystem will read as naive to a Castrol evaluator.
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Name the segment and size it
Do not write a recommendation for the Indian automotive market. Write it for a specific segment, a specific geography and a specific channel, then size that opportunity with a transparent calculation. A visible bottom up estimate with stated assumptions beats a confident number with no working.
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For Supply Chain, make cost to serve your anchor
Network design, inventory placement, primary versus secondary distribution and demand planning all ladder up to cost to serve and availability. Frame your recommendation in those terms and quantify the impact, even directionally, and you will be speaking the jury's own language.
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Bring the energy transition in, but keep it commercial
Electrification, EV fluids, sustainability and circularity are all live topics for Castrol and bp. They are excellent context. They are a weak recommendation on their own if you cannot connect them to volume, margin or cost today. Use the trend to justify the direction, then land on something actionable this year.
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Write the executive summary before the deck
One line on the problem, one line on the recommendation, one line on the impact. If those three lines are not sharp, the deck will not be either. Then build only the slides that defend those three lines.
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Design a team around the case, not your friend group
Read the brief first, then recruit. If the case is channel heavy you want someone comfortable with distributor economics. If it is network heavy you want someone who can build a simple model. Two people who think identically will produce a half strong submission.
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Rehearse the Q&A out loud
List the fifteen hardest questions a Castrol business leader could ask about your numbers, your assumptions and your implementation plan, and write a one paragraph answer for each. Teams win the final round in the answers, not in the script.
A closing reframe
Read the case first. Then decide, quickly.
Castrol has done something unusual here by putting the case in front of you before asking for anything. Use that. Register, open the Challenges tab, read the brief end to end, and then make an honest call on whether the problem excites you and whether you can give it two focused weekends. If the answer is yes, you are competing in one of the smallest, fastest and highest quality funnels available to a 1st year MBA this season.
If the answer is no, you have lost twenty minutes. That is a good trade either way, and it is a far better process than registering blind for everything and submitting rushed work to all of it.
A quick checklist before you hit submit
1. Your campus is on the eligible list for the track you picked, and you are a 1st year.
2. The submission follows the exact slide or page limit and file naming convention on the portal.
3. The executive summary fits on one slide and stands on its own.
4. Every number has a visible assumption or a named source, in the slide or the appendix.
5. The recommendation could be actioned by a Castrol manager next quarter, with an owner and a rough cost.
6. You have a screenshot of the confirmation screen and the confirmation email.
How AceMBA students prepare for case competitions
AceMBA · Super100 · AceCase Pro
Frameworks, real briefs and mentors who have won these rounds.
AceCase Pro and AcePrep Pro sit inside Super100, our 12-month track for MBAs who want to convert competitions and placements in the same year. Every session is recorded, so joining mid-season still gets you the full program.
✦ Expert-led case-solving sessions that move from structuring fundamentals to national-competition submissions
✦ A deck and storyline review loop, so your submission gets torn apart by a mentor before a jury sees it
✦ Sector primers on FMCG, auto, industrials and supply chain, the categories these corporate cases keep coming back to
✦ Mock jury Q&A rounds built to mirror the pressure of a live panel of business leaders
✦ 1:1 mentorship from seniors who have cleared the same funnels and converted the same internships
✦ A private cohort across top B-schools for team formation, peer feedback and warm intros
This article references Castrol PowerUp 4.0 for educational and informational purposes only. AceMBA is an independent MBA career-readiness platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or officially associated with Castrol, Castrol India, bp, or any business school referenced. All names, brands, logos and trademarks, including Castrol, PowerUp and bp, are the sole property of their respective owners and are used here purely for informational and reference purposes. Competition details, eligibility criteria, dates, prizes and round structures are drawn from publicly available sources, including the official bp event portal, Castrol communications and publicly shared accounts from past participants, and may change at the sole discretion of Castrol or bp. The round structure described here is an informed reconstruction based on past editions and publicly shared participant accounts, not an official rulebook, and the official event portal remains the only authoritative source for format, templates, deadlines and rules. References to past editions, winners and internship outcomes are based on publicly shared accounts and AceMBA mentor observations, not on confidential Castrol evaluation criteria, and do not imply any guaranteed outcome. Prize amounts and PPI opportunities are as communicated by the organisers and are subject to their terms. Outcomes vary from team to team, and AceMBA accepts no responsibility for any decision, outcome, expectation or result arising from following the guidance shared here. References to external platforms are for convenience only and do not constitute endorsement, partnership or sponsorship.
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