Well, I'm a bit of a diesel head it has to be said,
Peugeot are also running in LeMan as well as Audi with a diesel powered rocket ship,
It has to be said though that the Peugeot is the faster of the 2 but because it wasn't as reliable as the Audi, it lost out on a podium finish,
I love diesels, I love the big torque they offer over there petrol counterparts and I love the fact that you can have the performance and not use enough fuel to power my village for the rest of the year. But there are drawback like you've mentioned before,
Diesel engines are heavy because they need to be a lot (and I do mean a lot) stronger than there petrol counterparts, take my engine for example, It's an older design but still a good engine, it has a cast iron head and block. But it would need to because it has a compression ratio of 23:1 and runs about 18 psi (that's 1.24 bar for people who work in new money) of turbo pressure, no petrol engine would run that..... so now wonder they are heavy to contain the amount of pressure it has to contend with,
The noise they produce isn't exactly, fruity....
but then again...listen to these...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH7UOFSMaAg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHLXIdq3sYg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7eunW70UXY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THlqwMldhsM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkrG_zjz_B8