Engine Failures at LeMans

at the beach

at the beach

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While attending the STC’s Tiger 60th Anniversary Celebration I simply needed to get off my feet, so I found myself a comfortable chair in the hotel’s lobby to take a break. I was soon shocked to see who decided to sit down next to me. It was the legendary Tiger rally and LeMans coupe driver, Peter Procter.

I quickly realized that fate had presented me with a unique opportunity too wonderful for me to pass up. I boldly mentioned the engine failures in the 1964 LeMans race. Peter immediately blurted out, “Rootes never put baffles in the oil pans!”

Later, Peter’s wife shared that before the race Peter had told Marcus Chambers about the need for baffles. Marcus berated Peter saying “Remember, you are only a driver! Leave the mechanical decisions to those who know what they are doing!”

It's great to still be able to learn things about Tiger history "from the horse's mouth".
Buck

Peter Procter.jpg
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Shelby built the engines for the Le Mans cars.... It's long been suspected that he didn't want the cars to be competitive against his entries. This is, more or less, confirmed as he refunded Rootes for the engines.... after much complaining....

But, I completely agree with Procter.... baffles were long known to be of benefit to counter cornering forces on the oil in the pan....
 
Austin Healer said:
Shelby built the engines for the Le Mans cars.... It's long been suspected that he didn't want the cars to be competitive against his entries. This is, more or less, confirmed as he refunded Rootes for the engines.... after much complaining....

But, I completely agree with Procter.... baffles were long known to be of benefit to counter cornering forces on the oil in the pan....
Click to expand...
In context... The alpines that raced the previous year suffered big end failure.... Wonder if they had baffled the sumps on them....
 
Austin Healer said:
Shelby built the engines for the Le Mans cars.... It's long been suspected that he didn't want the cars to be competitive against his entries. This is, more or less, confirmed as he refunded Rootes for the engines.... after much complaining....

But, I completely agree with Procter.... baffles were long known to be of benefit to counter cornering forces on the oil in the pan....
Click to expand...
I have never been able to figure out what type person would buy into that wives tale about Shelby sabotaging the engines.

Off the top of my head without fact checking...
The Shelby vehicles were hundreds of pounds lighter (300?) and had over 10% more CID than the Tigers. The Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupes had a top end of the Mulsanne Straight about 30 mph faster than the Tigers. They were 30 seconds quicker per lap! That meant the Shelby coupes would lap the Tigers every 8 laps. The Cobras were equipped with a carb designed for road racing similar to the Tiger LAT 715CFM option, not the dual quad drag race setup (with side hung floats that were terrible in corners) that somebody at Rootes chose for their LeMans Tigers. The Shelby Daytona Coupes were in the GT class, not the (faster?) prototype class that the Tigers were in. To do well, Shelby's cars just needed to finish. It was irrelevant to Shelby's race interests if the Tigers went slower or dropped out. I have never figured out any possible motivation for Shelby to hurt Tiger performance. On the contrary, the more Tigers sold meant more money in his pocket.

Shelby eventually grossed over $35K from Tiger sales. He would have had to be an idiot to risk that money by sabotaging cars that didn't matter a bit to his team's race outcome. Shelby wasn't an idiot. And Carroll certainly did like the idea of extra dollars.

Buck,
heading west
 
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at the beach said:
I have never been able to figure out what type person would buy into that wives tale about Shelby sabotaging the engines.

Off the top of my head without fact checking...
The Shelby vehicles were hundreds of pounds lighter (300?) and had over 10% more CID than the Tigers. The Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupes had a top end of the Mulsanne Straight about 30 mph faster than the Tigers. They were 30 seconds quicker per lap! That meant the Shelby coupes would lap the Tigers every 8 laps. The Cobras were equipped with a carb designed for road racing similar to the Tiger LAT 715CFM option, not the dual quad drag race setup (with side hung floats that were terrible in corners) that somebody at Rootes chose for their LeMans Tigers. The Shelby Daytona Coupes were in the GT class, not the (faster?) prototype class that the Tigers were in. To do well, Shelby's cars just needed to finish. It was irrelevant to Shelby's race interests if the Tigers went slower or dropped out. I have never figured out any possible motivation for Shelby to hurt Tiger performance. On the contrary, the more Tigers sold meant more money in his pocket.

Shelby eventually grossed over $35K from Tiger sales. He would have had to be an idiot to risk that money by sabotaging cars that didn't matter a bit to his team's race outcome. Shelby wasn't an idiot. And Carroll certainly did like the idea of extra dollars.

Buck,
heading west
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As early as 12 May.. 2 DAYS after the prepared engines were rec'd from Shelby, low oil pressure was noted during testing. This was found to be due to oil surge to the front of the pan (no baffles) and windage (oil whipped up by the crankshaft) as there was no windage tray either. It was judged that there was no available solution and the instruction given was to not overfill the sump. This was STUPID as the centrifugal forced just pulled the oil away from the pump pickup... less oil, no oil pressure. On the Wednesday prior to the race one car had already destroyed it's main bearings. (the #8 car) after only covering 1.5 laps. The #9 car wouldn't rev past 5000 RPM and recorded low oil pressure as well. Likely it's bearings were also destroyed. In the race, a new engine was installed in #8 which subsequently destroyed a piston and #9 broke it's crankshaft after 3 hours. Likely both as a result of oiling issues.

The Tiger was only160lbs heavier than the Cobras, not hundreds or anything approaching 300lbs. The Le Mans Tiger was only 66lbs heavier than a standard Tiger.

All of this is in print and readily available.

Per the contemporary media reports, the failures were based on poor handling... Ballisat said the opposite.. Rumors at the time suggested that Shelby's test bed was out of commission and the engines weren't properly bench tested. The failures were attributed, BY ROOTES, to be slack clearances at the main bearings... which in "Chambers' opinion" accounted for the low oil pressures.

The last line of the commentary was from Chambers... "When we confronted Shelby with the problem, he was not willing to comment, and it was not until Rootes applied certain pressure that we were refunded."

Shelby won at Le Mans, he had come up with the successful 260/289 racing Cobras and later, the Daytona. He had all of Ford's engineers helping and at his beck and call. It just isn't conceivable that he wouldn't have taken into account the forces on oil in an oil pan (windage and centrifugal forces) on a road race spec engine, or that Ford wouldn't have known. To lay this at the feet of the Rootes group is ridiculous. They had ZERO experience with thin-wall cast V8 engines and relied on Ford and later Chryslers engineers to do the work for them.

Rootes should have asked Geoffrey Healey about oil surge and windage... He (and BMC) solved both with the entries for Sebring (The UJB and FAC cars)... As Chambers had also been Comps. MGR . for BMC, it would have been natural to ask.... I talked with Geoff about this in the months before he died in 1993. They double the size of the oil pan increasing the oil capacity from 6 qts to 12qts and put in a baffles to control surge... Aston Martin (who Shelby won Le Mans for) did the same thing for the 3.7 and 4.0L 6 cylinder engines due to oil pressure losses from expansion (alloy block). Aston ended up running a 17 qt capacity system on the DB5. They also reduced the running clearances on the bearings to .005". I normally set up engines with .015" oil clearance on mains and rods... Racing clearances tend to be slightly higher. The larger the clearance the lower the pressure... you either have to compensate with a higher pressure, or higher volume, oil pump.

This was basic knowledge in the 60's as it is now....

.
 
michael-king said:
In context... The alpines that raced the previous year suffered big end failure.... Wonder if they had baffled the sumps on them....
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I kind of doubt it... Rootes engineers really had zero experience with setting up a proper racing engine. They built "pedestrian" cars. The days of the 1920's Tiger were just but a fading memory! The requirements of a road course track car is quite a different beast than rally car built for the Alpine or Monte. With those cars the suspension and brakes get beat to hell... Kind of like your recounting of the Paris to Peking Tiger... There are no flat out road courses for 24 hours to put the engine to the extremes. With rallies it's all about being extremely robust and maintaining an average speed over distance. I built a Healey a couple of decades back for a Carrera Pan America retrospective... Most of my efforts were to strengthen up the suspension and to provide redundancies for electrics (engine and ignition) and fuel supply (larger tanks and better lines and pumps...
 
There are two main ways of lubricating an engine. One is boundary Lubrication which is used for all moving parts not fed with oil under pressure . This includes parts such as the cylinder walls, valve stems, etc. The other form of engine lubrication is hydrodynamic lubrication which is used to lubricate surfaces which carry heavy loads at high speeds. Initially when the crank shaft is stationary it rests on the bearing and is separated from the bearing by a film of left over oil. As the shaft begins to rotate in the bearing it will be lubricated by boundary lubrication until pressurized oil fills the clearance between the shaft and the bearing. Once up to speed the shaft drags around the oil to form a film of lubricant underneath the shaft and that lifts the shaft and allows it to center in the bearing. The oil used must be matched dependent on the bearing clearance and the volume and pressure settings of the oil pump. Modern racing oils have a short term additive package to protect the engine under high speed, high rpm race conditions. Race oils are not intended for prolonged use such as every day normal driving due the short life of the additive package. The Tiger engines may have had excessive clearances or low pressure pumps that didn't lubricate and protect the engine bearings under the race conditions.. Keep in mind that the oils at that time carried an SB rating. Today's rating is SP. Lots of difference in the additives and the base stock used way back when.
 
If the bearings are starved due to windage (aeration of the oil) or by lack of oil due to starvation because of oil surge, it hardly matters what the spec of the oil used was... In the 60's most dry sump racing applications used vegetable-based oils instead of mineral based. It was specified by Cosworth in the SCA, and later engines...

In any event, if the bearing clearances aren't correct there will be a massive loss of oil pressure throughout the engine, regardless of oil type or rated weight. That's why the Aston Martin used such tight clearances. As alloy blocks aren't dimensionally stable between cold start and running temp, the manufacturer reduced the allowable clearances. With Ford engines, a good rule of thumb is .010-.015 oil clearances at the rods and mains... Go over than and you're either going to have to increase volume or pressure to ensure adequate lubrication of the engine. The same applies to Austin, Jaguar and TR engines.

People bitch about British cars leaking oil... When the Brits were 1st building engines, oil pressures and oil loss weren't even a consideration. The engines had "total loss" oiling systems. Basically, a tank of oil that dripped down from the top to the bottom... no oil pumps, just a regulator to either speed up the oil or slow it down.

This lubricated the engine and kept the dust down when the oil hit the road... It had the added benefit of rust proofing the underside of the car. So the concept of "oil pressure" and preventing oil loss was a foreign concept... To expect them to worry about either when preparing a race car seems a little hopeful, at best!
 
On Rootes and their race knowledge.

While they were quite successful in rally events.. they did have a decent amount of track experience by 1964.. how much they learnt from their mistakes... Well who knows... But they were trying to learn.

They first entered LeMans and Sebring in 1961. At LM with the Harrington they kicked into a class win.. but 3000RW despite all the undertray, aero front end and fastback wasn't noticeably faster than the stock body car.. suprisingly when you consider the Mulsanne was a 3+ mile flat out straight in those days....

The following year the Kamn tail alpine body style is used and proves as fast with a factory hardtop.

They tested the cars extensively before sebring the following year and the cars did better.

In 63 LM they pushed the tuning in the Alpine with dual Weber's higher compression and had engine failures... However later that year in the same spec the cars did survive the Tour de France which was high speed road sections and several circuit races.

I know that guys running alpines in SCCA racing had started to modify the sumps for more capacity and baffled them... Wonder if the factory had awareness of this.

The Tiger effort in 64 to my understanding they chose to run the 260 for marketing reasons.. that the road cars would have that motor .... Seems odd to me given they had such custom bodies that they really don't have much visual ID and even though the front guards are the same.. they had much bigger arches and flares ... So that doesn't make sense... And they were in the prototype class...

If you wanted advertising value you would use a stock body car with alloy panels and run the 289 cobra motor... People cant see the engine and you have a stock looking car. The race alpines all had alloy opening panels to lighten them but keep stock loo.

I don't know why rootes did what they did... I don't think Shelby would sabotage the motors deliberately on a reliability front ..... but I also don't think he would have advised them in a way to maximise their performance .. think about fords concern about the Tiger v Mustang in scca BP ....

I'm not sure what records exist about the decisions...but they were strange ....which is consistent with general rootes management... 🫠

@at the beach Buck, I hadn't heard why the Tiger ran the dual quad carters... That's interesting.
 
I guess I just look at engine lubrication and engine failures in a different manner than most folks due to being in the lube business for several decades. I've gone thru a lot of lubrication training over the years and I'm also a CLE. Oils also contain an antifoaming ingredient to prevent the introduction of "air" which produces foam. The engine oils in the mid 60's are far from the specs of today's engine oils. If there had been oil samples run at the time there may have been obvious reasons for the engine failures instead of speculation. FYI, many refer to the "weight" of oil when they should be using the term "viscosity" of the oil.
 
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Two Tiger LeMans Coupe drivers, Claude Dubois and Peter Procter, have both told me directly that while they lost oil pressure in the corners it was fine on the straights. That never sounded to me like bearing clearance problems.
Buck
 
at the beach said:
Two Tiger LeMans Coupe drivers, Claude Dubois and Peter Procter, have both told me directly that while they lost oil pressure in the corners it was fine on the straights. That never sounded to me like bearing clearance problems.
Buck
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That is very much a starving as the oil climbs the sump side.... I learnt that expensive lesson in my Alpine many moons ago ... Watched the oil psi needle go left while in a corner.. back into the straight and pressure came back up... But I now had a new ticking sound... 😮‍💨
 
Austin Healer said:
If the bearings are starved due to windage (aeration of the oil) or by lack of oil due to starvation because of oil surge, it hardly matters what the spec of the oil used was... In the 60's most dry sump racing applications used vegetable-based oils instead of mineral based. It was specified by Cosworth in the SCA, and later engines...

In any event, if the bearing clearances aren't correct there will be a massive loss of oil pressure throughout the engine, regardless of oil type or rated weight. That's why the Aston Martin used such tight clearances. As alloy blocks aren't dimensionally stable between cold start and running temp, the manufacturer reduced the allowable clearances. With Ford engines, a good rule of thumb is .010-.015 oil clearances at the rods and mains... Go over than and you're either going to have to increase volume or pressure to ensure adequate lubrication of the engine. The same applies to Austin, Jaguar and TR engines.

People bitch about British cars leaking oil... When the Brits were 1st building engines, oil pressures and oil loss weren't even a consideration. The engines had "total loss" oiling systems. Basically, a tank of oil that dripped down from the top to the bottom... no oil pumps, just a regulator to either speed up the oil or slow it down.

This lubricated the engine and kept the dust down when the oil hit the road... It had the added benefit of rust proofing the underside of the car. So the concept of "oil pressure" and preventing oil loss was a foreign concept... To expect them to worry about either when preparing a race car seems a little hopeful, at best!
Click to expand...
Not only British cars My 1910 Hupmobile has a total loss oil system as well - when you drive it every 20 feet or so it drops a spot of oil -Shows up clearly in the wet and is like a trail of breadcrumbs marking your progress .
 
michael-king said:
That is very much a starving as the oil climbs the sump side.... I learnt that expensive lesson in my Alpine many moons ago ... Watched the oil psi needle go left while in a corner.. back into the straight and pressure came back up... But I now had a new ticking sound... 😮‍💨
Click to expand...
Thank gosh for dry sump oiling systems.
 
Oil supply and clearances

are not the only issues.

On page 112 of the Taylor

book, it was mentioned the

cars lost oil pressure on the

Mulsanne STRAIGHT.

You NEED to keep control of oil

Temps as well.

Clearly, Rootes had more issues

than they could keep control of.

...And maybe one major issue

was when Norman Garrad left

the competition Dept?

DW
 
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