Another major reason for very heavy weight oil in full-on alky and nitro motors is related to having huge bearing clearances. Where we might run .002 on a high-performance street engine (.001 per inch of journal diameter), the full-on top-fuel and alky motors will run twice that. With those large bearing clearances, you need a heavier film of oil to take up the larger gaps. Also, with dry-sump oil pumps, they're running over twice the oil pressure that we run on the street.
At Bonneville in our FlatCAD motor, we run about 120 PSI from the dry-sump pump and run 50 wt racing oil. Our bearing clearances are about .0025 on the rods and .003 to .004 on the mains. The rear main is always looser than the rest as that part of the crank tends to get the hottest (expanding more).