Apart from contemporary exotics like the FXX-K or the Huayra - the car I'd love to hear is the BRM 1.5l V16 (600bhp at 12,000rpm) designed in the 1940s!
What a truly incredible sound, with incredible sound quality, too. I highly recommend that everyone drop what they are doing, put on headphones, and listen to that. Just when you think it cannot get any better, it does!
Ah, the "British Racing Misery". Super powerful but very unreliable. That, along with the three liter BRM H16 (which was too heavy to be competitive) were rather exotic engines. But yes, they must have sounded great, at least when they didn't break down, that is.
I really like the sound (in recorded footage, would love to hear it in person) of the Cosworth DFV, although it's a much more conventional engine. The (inherently unbalanced) flat plane V8 engine with an unusual valve arrangement, coupled with a tuned exhaust has a great sound. It's was a handful to drive with a very narrow power band, giving out only a few hundred horsepower at ~6000 rpm, and quickly jumping to 400+ hp at 7500 rpm when the exhaust tuning does its trick. You can hear from the exhaust note when it's about to kick.
The only thing better about that car is hearing John Hindhaugh of Radio Le Mans start talking about it during a race and he says "1000 Brake Horsepower" (Gasoline Engine + Super Capacitor Hybrid System). you can hear the smile on his face as he says it.
The rotary engine is amazing. In the RX8, the powerband kicks in around 4500-5000 rpm, and pulls strong right up through the redline at 9500 rpm. The engine loves high rpm! You can sit in 3rd gear running at 8500 rpm at 80+ mph on the highway and it'll just take it without question. The BMI 4 rotor has a much higher redline, if I recall, near 11,000+ rpm.
A friend of mine has an '85 RX7 (last of the original series, and a GSE no less) with some mods, including exhaust replacement. It's such a great sounding engine. I love that a little redline alarm goes off not because you're in danger of blowing it up, but because you're out of the power band at that point. You can't really blow up a rotary engine like you can a piston engine - it doesn't have crap like spring-loaded valves to bounce. As long as it has oil, it's happy.
And no fake anything in that car! You really feel the road when you're driving, feel the mechanicals as well as hear them. I really should buy it from him one of these days.
> And thus we reach biggest complaint about rotary engines.
Complaint? Never heard one from an RX8 owner (only shock from new owners who didn't read-up on how the engine operates, and thought they had a leak someplace!).
If you changed your oil out when you were supposed to, chances were you'd never notice it eating oil.
I first came across about 5 MP3 files in the late 90's or early 00's that seem to have been taken from the same recordings as this. I was a teenager and listened to them regularly, dreaming of being a racing driver. That flyby around 2:00 still puts my hair on end every time. Lots of nostalgia in listening to this again, for me - truly glorious stuff. The best ground-going engine I've ever heard :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Racing_Motors_V16
Mind you - I still think the best engine sound I've heard is from a Rolls Royce Merlin...