What oil temperatures (range) do you guys get? How hot does it get inside our engines? I'm thinking about conducting an experiment and will report the results when completed.

 

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I have the CWC oil coolers. At normal idle it is about 175 deg. and it drops to sub 170 when cruising. It rises to about 180-185 at WOT. That is with Valvoline VR1 racing oil 20w-50. I just changed to redline. Haven't noticed a diff in temps yet.

These numbers are averages for me in Texas for the past 2 months. It has been anywere from 20-80 degrees here lately. One day when it was in the low 30's, oil temps were in the low 160's.

 

I just installed a digital oil temp guage about 3 weeks ago in my R2, I sealed all the gaps around the coolers so all the air must flow threw and straitened the fins out.After reading that the stock coolers were not that good I expected high temps.But I was surprised how effective they are even in 85F + S.Fla heat plus my car is black.My temps at idle are around 180-182F when cruising stop and go traffic I see 183-190F in the high way I see a solid 165F.

 

I don't know if any one else keeps track of (or cares about) rotor head temps but I consider it the most significant engine temp reading to keep track of. Oil, H2O and EGT temps are all downstream and won't really tell you if something is about to go REALLY (ie: lean) wrong. EGT is helpful for tuning only, and a wide band sensor is needed anyway to extract the best tuning possible.

My rotor head temps (sensor is a ring around the base of each leading spark plug) run from 175F on a 45F morning to 200F on a warm (85F) afternoon running around town. They might get a few degrees warmer after a couple of WOT runs, but only a few. The rear rotor runs a little bit warmer than the front. I guess I'm interested in why you consider oil temp so important. My feeling is that once the oil is warmed up you are good to go. I can't imagine oil getting any hotter than what the other guys have already reported without a major problem.
I love experiments! - what are you doing? - I've got one of my own under way ventilating the engine compartment with the NACA side ducts, and I am going to take temp readings soon with a highly accurate pyrometer at different under hood locations with/without my mod.