Red Bull Concept Car
 

So this is completely out of curiosity. I seen that racing beat has a 13G engine that is on their site for $48,000. It's supposed to make over 1000 horsepower on methanol/alcohol. Would this not be the perfect engine to put in the Red Bull concept car from Gran Turismo 5? The car on GT5 was running nearly 20,000rpm and was supposedly a V6 producing around 1200 horsepower. Wouldn't this be about the closest thing? Also, what transmission could you run on a car like that that would allow it to be mid-engined? I know they race some of the mid-engined rotaries at Laguna Seca.

I've never heard of a rotary running that fast of a crank speed. It would take a lot of engineering for little gain.

The difficulty with high RPM is that the inertial forces increase with the cube of engine speed. Going from 15,000 RPM to 20,000 RPM the inertial forces are at a completely different order of magnitide.

Other things that make life difficult is by the time things are spinning at 20,000 RPM, lubrication of shafts is also troubling. Journal bearings will have enormous viscous loads on them, and roller bearings will be running dry as all the oil slings away.

Of course, there are ways around these. Turbochargers spin at 100-150k RPM all the time. And turbine engines also spin at rediculous speeds too. But a rotary engine spinning at 20,000 RPM seems out of the realm of normal. At those speeds the apex seals would be pushing in to the housings with pretty enormous force.
-Dan