I have a thing for road cars turned race cars. They’re like the ultimate form of what you see in dealerships and on the street. They’re like as good as the basic car design can be. And that’s what makes this BMW M8 GTE interesting. Inside every 8 Series road car we can expect to see soon lives this version that sounds like a V8 falling down a flight of stairs.
Let’s take a listen to the M8 GTE testing at Monza, thanks to the wonderful race car testing cataloger 19Bozzy92. The M8 GTE uses BMW’s twin-turbo V8 running a flat-plane crank, and it sounds like there’s some good kind of anti-lag going.
It sounds sick in the same way that the Ford GT does. It’s always burning extra gas to keep the turbos spooled up, or at least that’s how it sounds.
Listen to how much louder and stranger it is than its rival Aston Martin Vantage GTE, which uses a Mercedes twin-turbo V8. The Merc engine sounds like an air pump and not much else.
But then also listen to how thundering the best of the naturally-aspirated modern V8s sound. This is a Corvette C7.R, the high standard for V8 race car noise.
At the track, you feel the Corvettes go by. Even on video you get a sense of how much more dramatic they are.
But then, no turbo clatter. A trade off for sure.