Williams oil cooler effectiveness - Back to back test

After finding out (and detailing in a seperate post) that I had a couple of heater hoses on the wrong way round, I also realised that this meant the oil cooler had not been receiving a flow of hot water from the heater circuit, resulting in the oil taking quite a while to warm up.
I had also noticed that when driving the car hard and also at motorway speeds the oil was getting up to 110 degrees celsius. Which seemed a little on the high side to me.

After swapping the heater hoses around, I had a working heater and a flow of hot water to the oil cooler / heat exchanger.

I then gave the car a hard test drive and noted that the oil was not getting over 100 degrees celsius. Not a highly technical test, but it did show on a back to back test that the heat exchanger warms up the oil more quickly and then seems to reduce maximum oil temperatures by approx 10 degrees celsius.

I hope that this info is of interest to someone 😉

As always Phil...

Regards Ian

Makes you wonder why they removed it on the phase 2 valvers though.

It's because of the warming up thing that I run this setup along with a mocal cooler on my track car

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Originally Posted by ianbirch

As always Phil...

Regards Ian

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Cheers Ian, moral of the story.
Have a great memory or take loads of images👍

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Originally Posted by 16v_paddy

Makes you wonder why they removed it on the phase 2 valvers though.

It's because of the warming up thing that I run this setup along with a mocal cooler on my track car

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Well the warming up part certainly works. I was less convinced about the oil cooling effectiveness since its basically a small donut unit with only a partial flow of coolant through it. But it turns out that it does have a small effect on the higher oil temps.
Years back I had a Lotus Elise and I fittted a Laminova heat exchanger on that, significantly bigger than the Williams set up and it was plumbed into the full flow of the “Hot” side of the radiator. That did a great job at keeping the oil temps rock steady.

I think that for track use (As you may have already proven Paddy) you would see oil temps creeping up to scary levels wi the std Williams set up.
I thought that I was going to have to launch “Project oil cooler” over the winter to keep the oil temps from getting over 100, looks like I dont need to do that now. Its not like I dont have anything to do in my spare time....😉

Thing is though, the operating temperatures of oils is usually wel over 100 degrees and the thermostat on a Williams opens up at 89 degrees so the oil will always be hotter than the coolant which in turn takes some of the heat from it.

The grade of oil used is also an important factor as well, when I took my completely standard Valver on track I put some Shell Helix Racing 10w60 in it which is made for operating at temps above 120 degrees which meant I didn't need to be concerned when it was getting that hot.

I remember my very 1st trackday in my Valver, was paranoid about the high oil temp issue so fitted a proper mocal cooler to that, spent so much time looking at the temp gauge and it being completely fine that I just kept going. Being a total newbie to it, I just kept going until I was about to run out of fuel and just as I decided it was time to go back in I was doing about 100mph, coming up to a bend, went to brake & the pedal just dropped to the floor, turns out I'd been on track for an hour, boiled the brakes & did some damage to the wishbone ball joints and track rod ends - didn't adjust tyre pressures correctly to suit Castle Combe :lol:

LOL, sounds like you were having a very, very good time Paddy.
Its easy to become paranoid about gauges eh.
At least, I identified I had something connected up incorrectly and solved the problem (after input from Matt Brown) and now I have a heater 👍, oh, and a heat exchanger.

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Originally Posted by PhilW

LOL, sounds like you were having a very, very good time Paddy.
Its easy to become paranoid about gauges eh.
At least, I identified I had something connected up incorrectly and solved the problem (after input from Matt Brown) and now I have a heater 👍, oh, and a heat exchanger.

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Glad you saw the issue before anything went badly wrong!

With the oil cooler plate and normal enthusiastic driving, you're fine, but for track days it needs an oil cooler and maybe a baffled sump if you are pushing hard/on slicks etc. I had bottom end oil starvation at Brands Hatch in 0217.