A soul, perhaps. The Mazda 787B is one of those cars. The car that won the 1991 Le Mans 24 Hours as an unfancied underdog, the first Japanese car to do so and, as yet, the only rotary-engined winner.

Normally, the Turn 10 sound engineers use Dyno Authority in a business and residential area of Seattle to record their cars' sounds, but when it came to the 1991 Mazda 787B that was unleashed in ...