For Bugatti's New V16, the Sound Took as Long as the Engineering

Bugatti's engineers spent thousands of hours tuning the exhaust note of the Tourbillon's V16, an engine that revs to 9,000 rpm and needed to sound the part without running afoul of noise regulations. Getting there meant balancing two demands that don't usually cooperate: the raw, mechanical character collectors expect from a naturally aspirated sixteen-cylinder, and the acoustic limits modern rules impose on any road car. The team treated the exhaust note as its own piece of engineering, not an afterthought to the mechanical work underneath it. For a car built to be driven and remembered, not just specified on paper, the result is a sound its makers clearly consider inseparable from the machine itself.

With reporting from The Drive.