Panteras have similar cooling systems, and any Pantera that is run hard on a race track suffers from oil temperature problems, even when engine temperature is well under control. Many Pantera guys are in the 'no news is good news' camp and don't instrument their cars; one friend who has, has fought oil temp problems on the track for years, trying a series of air-to-oil coolers mounted in various places, all with no success. He can get the oil to 300 degrees in just a few laps.
I drove a 1985 Pantera GT5-S from Spain to France to Italy a few years ago, and it was equipped with an oil temperature gauge. At triple-digit speeds, the oil temp would climb up to 300 degrees, which is devastating. We would have to slow down and finally drove the car using the oil temp gauge as a speedometer!
Laminova water to oil coolers seem like the optimal solution for cars that don't have good airflow to cool things naturally. GT40s historically used air-to-oil coolers and are equipped with various scoops etc. to facilitate that. But water-to-oil coolers are generally more efficient, and have the secondary benefit of allowing the water to warm the oil. Ultimately the oil adds heat to the water, which in turn impacts the cooling system, but a proper radiator should be able to deal with it. Friends who have done before-and-after tests found that the oil temperature and water temperatures stabilized, with the water temperature about ten degrees hotter than before, and the oil temperature being the same as the water temperature, instead of skyrocketing off the gauge. That seems like a good trade-off.
Here's a direct link to the type of coolers I've seen employed with success:
Laminova
These suckers are expensive!
However, Ford Crown Victoria police cars (only the police cars) were equipped from the factory with similar units (built by Laminova), and they can be had fairly cheaply if one scours E-bay etc.
One early adopter of this concept found out the hard way that Fluidyne quality isn't always the best. He bought a Fluidyne water-to-oil cooler:
FLUIDYNE - High Performance - Radiators and Oil Coolers
And fairly shortly, his unit turned into a water-to-oil MIXER. It broke internally and flooded the coolant with oil (since the oil pressure was higher than the water pressure). Then, after engine shutdown when the oil pressure dropped to zero and the radiator cap was holding 16 psi, it went the other way and pumped coolant into the oil, turning it into latté.
They stood behind their product and gave him a new one for free, but he still had to pull the engine to change the bearings, pump all the passageways clean, and he also had a heck of a time flushing the oil out of his cooling system. So there *are* potential drawbacks to this plan....
