WHAT IS NORMAL OIL TEMPERATURE ON A 330 GTC?

Steve, in my experience, engine oil temp is generally lower than water temp. The oil temp is mainly a function of engine revs at durations; meaning, you cruise at high speed for an extended period and your oil temp can come up to same level as your water temp. As far as IR reading, I think the most accurate reading would be at the oil sump.

john

 

Steve,
Are you certain on degrees? One is Metric, the other (coolant) is USA.

Normally oil is cooler than water in a road car, if yours is really Centigrade, too hot for the road. Racing, well that's another story.

Regards, and HNY!
Alberto

 

Steve,
Are you saying that your dash gauges are mixed (WATER TEMP in °F and TEMP OLIO in °C)?

 

Steve, the oil temp is reasonable, specially if driven hard. My race car would see around 250 F.
but it has 2 XL oil coolers.
I think you are OK.

Regards, Alberto

 

Steve: Does your car have either the twin separate oil coolers or the Daytona style cooler in the bottom of the radiator? Early GTC's had NO oil cooler at all.

 

Steve: chassis number?

 

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I just came off of an engine rebuild also

 

Looks perfect to me. In a hot summer with hard driving your oil temp. could easily get up to 120C. You shouldn't be worried about that. As long as your oil pressure doesn't drop while keeping the revs everything is just fine.

 

So all these temps (even on the gauges) seem perfectly fine to me. I am not a super experienced Ferrari mechanic, but like to think I know the theory of how such things work, and if you are running with zeal, but without an external oil cooler, yeah, the oil is going to be hotter than the coolant.

Regarding the use of the IR gun, it is a good way to get objective confirmation of *relative* temps, but unless you have some way to calibrate for temp-loss through the walls of the block, and for the radiation characteristics for the surface that you are reading off of, you really can't trust them for absolute numbers. I would not (for example) even trust an IR gun for relative temps if the surfaces were not of the exact same finish, and the exact same level of cleanliness. I actually have tried to do calibration of IR guns using surface mounted thermal sensors, and the surface finish makes a huge difference...

Looking at your numbers, 90C seems pretty normal for coolant. 110C seems a little on the high side for oil, but without an oil cooler, that seems expected to me; there must have been a reason why Ferrari added coolers later. So to my eyes, the impression is that your gauges are not far off (or at least are calibrated similarly to other vintage Ferrari gauges), and the difference with the IR gun is mostly an artifact of where/how the temp is being measured).

 

Oh, man, tell me about it. I watch all the gauges like a hawk when I'm driving.

BTW: Kudos for giving your car some "stick"; I bet a lot (majority?) of these cars have not seen 110C on their oil for decades...

 

Steve: You can always "tune" your gauges by installing resistors in the line from the senders. We do it as a matter of course with cars. Remember, automotive gauges are there to give you a "suggestion" of what is going on.

 

that is why most military vehicles only have a warning light and no gauges ( so during my german military time from 1976 until 1979, only the SLT 50/2 with the watercooled V 8 from MTU had a gauge and a warning light for water temperature. but had big problems with the gearbox temperature and for this the first edition not even had a warning light.

 

I found that the modern “superseding” oil/coolant temp senders from the popular suppliers read quite high relative to the original. Never thought about adding a resister to fix it, but that seems like a great solution.

 

Steve: 10 ohm, 1/2 watt. They are super cheap and you will need a selection to fine tune the gauge. Probably you will end up between 5 and 35 ohms.