I think I know what you mean. The problem with using samples is that they are recorded from outside the car, usually, such that you're only getting the airborne component.
When sat in the car, (I remember this being one of your bugbears for games) you get more than just the airborne bits. The engine is attached to a subframe, which is attached to the rest of the car. This attachment allows the vibrations / sound of the engine to be physically transduced through the car's structure to your butt, etc. In addition, the body and chassis "ring" at certain points (their anti-nodes) causing extra airborne sound - this is subtle, usually. A similar effect happens with the exhaust being excited by the gas pulses.
Modern cars have carefully designed mounts to avoid the transmission of engine "vibrations" to the chassis and hence the passenger cell, so they have a distinctive sound. Due to the fact that each car has a uniquely shaped chassis and body (more-or-less) each car has a different colouration to its sound, as heard when sat in it. Most people probably wouldn't be able to tell you what the difference was, but they would be aware of a difference in cabin sound, even with the same engine and overall sound insulation.
The louder the engine, though, the more the airborne component begins to take over - except that in race machines, the engine mounts are more or less solid, so the car feels like it's an extension of the engine. You get this impression with some performance cars, too - e.g. DC2 Type R, Lotus 7 derivatives etc.
The chassis / shell "ringing" can be faked with delayed filters, though it would be very tricky to get the correct frequency response (the nodes and anti-nodes are in different locations for different groups of frequencies - different delays / phases). If it were me making these sounds, I would probably hook up a pure-tone generator to a transducer on the engine block and record the resulting cabin sound, as well as using a pure-tone generator and loudspeaker (in different locations, e.g. engine, exhaust, tyres etc.) to record the resulting (muffled) airborne cabin sound, for a wide range of frequencies.
In addition, a second transducer could be used in the driver's seat for a dedicated "buttkicker" channel. This is all next-gen stuff, really, but some filthy hacks can be used (and be much less convincing) for this generation, especially since the PS3's Cell has those SPUs, which are ideal for this kind of DSP work - except that they're over-stressed as it is
), and Indeed it is completely wrong. As I said, kind of sounds like an LT4.
