What's your favorite engine sound? Is it the flat plane crank V-8 from the Ford Shelby GT350? What about the F20C engine in the Honda S2000 that revs to 9,000 rpm? Maybe you're more partial to the high-pitched sounds of a V-12 Ferrari engine? Your favorite engine sound may not even be from a road car; it's easy to find plenty of racing fans who sorely miss the mid-'90s V-10 era of Formula 1.

What if we told you there is a way to hear any engine you want without constantly searching on Google or YouTube? Thanks to the work of one software developer, not only is it possible to hear your favorite engine any time you want, but you can experiment with engines that don't actually exist.

Ange Yaghi, also known as "AngeTheGreat" on YouTube, developed an engine simulator application that allows the user to enter a series of parameters. From there the simulator recreates what the engine would sound like at idle, under load, and even deceleration. Yaghi would say the sounds produced by his application aren't 100 percent accurate, but they sound pretty good to us. We're not alone in that opinion either. The first video Yaghi released demonstrating his application has earned over a million views on YouTube in only a month's time.

Not only does Yaghi's engine simulator look fun to play with, it could be seriously useful to game developers large and small who make racing or driving games. Replicating engine sounds accurately is difficult and expensive. Some argue that even the big "triple A" racing games like Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport get it wrong. Yaghi may have just fixed that problem single-handedly.

After seeing and hearing the simulator for ourselves, we knew we had to talk to Ange about it; but we wanted to do more than just ask questions. The staff got together and we came up with the weirdest engine configurations that only minds steeped in decades of automotive cynicism could come up with. Though, it wasn't all completely weird stuff. We really wanted to know what Subaru's legendary F1 flat-12 would sound like. OK, maybe that was the only practical example we came up with. Everything else is completely bonkers. If you want to hear what Honda B-series would sound like as a V-8, or a 7.0 liter one-cylinder engine, check out the custom video Ange created for us above.

Naturally, we wanted to know much more about Ange and what led him to create such a cool software application. He was nice enough to talk with us about his background and what the future holds for his engine simulator software.

MotorTrend: What inspired you to create the engine simulator?

Ange Yaghi: In 2020 I purchased a 1974 (big-block) Corvette with my brother and we've worked together to restore it for the past two years. He's more mechanically inclined than I am and also has a degree in mechanical engineering, but neither of us had any experience working on cars prior to our acquisition. One thing we constantly had issues with though was the engine. It was perplexing and we ended up naming it the "demon motor" since nothing we ever did seemed to make it work properly.

Being engineers, we decided on the not-so-simple option of removing the engine and doing a clean rebuild ourselves. We put in hours upon hours of research, learning about different parts, what they do and what effect they had on performance. I learned an unbelievable amount from this process and eventually we did end up successfully building the engine and reinstalling it in the car.

What I wished, however, was to somehow incorporate all this new knowledge into my YouTube channel which is primarily focused on software. In December I started working on Engine Simulator as a personal challenge with the goal of fusing my interest in cars with my interest in software and simulations. I wasn't sure if a real-time engine simulation would be possible, but I took a risk and started working on the project. I worked on it on and off before finally releasing the video around eight months later.

MT: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while creating the simulator?

AY: My goal with the simulator was not to have it be 100 percent accurate, but rather, I wanted it to roughly account for all important effects observed in the real world. For instance, I wanted changing the cam lobe separation angle (LSA) to affect the torque curve similarly to how it did in real life. I wanted an engine with a more aggressive cam to idle rough without me telling it to, but rather as a result of the effect of the cam profile at lower RPM. I wanted header length to affect the efficiency of exhaust scavenging, and so on. What I found was, for each layer I successfully implemented, I'd find new real-world effects that were not accounted for and that indicated to me that there was something missing in my model. This process of refinement was grueling and really pushed the limits of my scientific understanding and software development skills.

MT: What is your favorite engine configuration that you have put into the simulator so far?

AY: I'm partial to V-8s myself and when I finally managed to reproduce that iconic sound as well as a convincing deceleration sound, I realized that the project might actually work after all.

AB: What is the weirdest engine configuration that you have put into the simulator?

AY: I admittedly have not played around with the simulator nearly as much as some of my viewers who make up the nearly 8,500 people in the official Engine Simulator Discord server. I've seen pretty much every engine configuration tested. X engines, H engines, triple cranks, quadruple cranks, W engines, extra long stroke, extra short stroke, etc. Radial engines are probably some of the more satisfying things I've seen run in the simulator. Probably the strangest I've seen is a single crank with 4 banks of cylinders. It's hard to explain what it is but I've attached a picture. Credit goes to RegularRuby670 from the Engine Simulator Official Discord server.

MT: What would you say is the most requested engine from the community?

AY: The most requested engine by far is the rotary (Wankel) engine. Unfortunately, the program only supports piston engines but I plan to add support for rotaries in the future game release.

MT: Do you have plans to expand on the application? Add features?

AY: I will be extending the application and am currently working on a polished version which I plan to release on Steam as a game/audio generation tool. This version will add a lot of requested features though the exact feature-set is not yet determined. It will definitely feature a more intuitive interface (the version available now is only a prototype and I did not intend for it to be used by so many people).

If you want to try out Yaghi's engine simulator for yourself, you can download it on his GitHub page. If you want to support Ange as he continues to expand on engine simulator he has a Patreon page set up that will give you exclusive access to demos of new builds and more.

Screenshots taken from Ange Yaghi's engine simulator application.