wearymicrobe wrote: I think you guys are way over-thinking this. If its the oil moving around in the corners just get a swinging oil pickup, baffle the pan a bit and add a accu-sump. Unless you can get the motor down significantly further, and you are going to be faster for it, why increase the modes of failure in the system.
Don't forget the ignition timing issues you can get from driving the oil pump by the distributor, which is what 90% of the common V8s did. A problem made way worse when the distributor was at the rear of the engine so you had a couple feet of springy iron camshaft driving the distributor.
Or, that one thing that regular gear-style pumps do very well is add a ton of heat to the oil. Something like half of the heat in the oil of an American V8 comes from the oil pump itself. They're really, really inefficient.
And then you're still at the mercy of the way the oil is routed through the engine. With a dry sump, it's easier to, say, feed the oil galleries wherever the heck you want to. Pump oil directly into both ends of the main galleries. Scavenge from a sealed intake valley without having the oil spill onto the rotating assembly. Stuff like that.
I mean, look at rotaries. Rotaries have next to no windage issues, a relatively efficient gear-rotor pump design, a fairly simple oiling problem to solve, and you're not going to get the engine much lower by makign the pan flat. Dry sumps are still used because they just plain work better.
