Lexus Love: Driving the LFA

MANILA, Philippines – In another Philippine STAR exclusive, James Deakin drives Lexus’ controversial supercar...

The seatbelt sign has just been switched off. I reach for my laptop, which is conveniently stuffed into the seat pocket in front of me for easy access and pop the screen open to wake up the hard drive from its brief nap. It’s a three hour flight to Manila from Bangkok, and I barely have three words in front of me. And after rearranging them for the umpteenth time, even those ones go into the recycle bin.

This is the writers curse. And it seems that the more I think about it, the harder it gets. The deadline was two hours ago and I haven’t even got a title yet. I need to have this done before touch down and all I see is that dreaded cursor flashing relentlessly like a dripping faucet that is getting louder and louder and slowly driving me insane.

Even in a pressurized cabin 37,000 feet above the South China sea I can feel the editorial screws tightening up as I stare at my own Everest: the blank page. There is nothing more intimidating, yet at the same time, nothing more rewarding, exciting and fulfilling when you get it right.

And that’s exactly what Lexus had in front of them when they dreamt up the LFA. Sure they could have cut and paste a pretty decent sports car, just as I could have slapped one generic sentence after the other to make up a minimum word count, but they chose to write their own story. And after ten years, they have one hell of a tale to tell.

No super car in recent history has attracted such controversy and The STAR was the only broadsheet from the Philippines that was invited to find out why. I had the honor of flying over to the historical race track in Goodwood, Sussex, to make sense of all the trash talk. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but after 20 laps or so, I can safely say that it is everything you thought Lexus wasn’t.

It’s funny, because you would think that the launch of a new super car would be a happy occasion for car enthusiasts; yet as soon as Toyota’s new CEO, Akio Toyoda, publicly confirmed production of the audacious LFA back in August 5, 2009, the “purists” came out in force and started ganging up on Lexus like a digital army closing in from every corner of the world wide web. Anyone would have thought they called it the LFU.

And like fungus, it grew – so by the time Lexus pulled the sheets off in Tokyo Motor show last October, the Internet was being polluted with more and more haters who centered their entire argument around Lexus’ lack of history and the LFA’s whopping $400,000 price tag. “For that kind of money I would buy the Carrera GT, the ZR1, or the 458”, was generally the war cry. Even the learned ones took their daggers out. Motoring’s most famous journalist, Jeremy Clarkson, with all his vast super car experience, lambasted the car, saying that the 323km/h super car from Lexus “Costs six times more than the Nissan GTR, but is not six times faster”, which is surprising considering his choice of vehicles. Or hairdresser.

For one, nothing on four wheels is six times faster than the 309 km/h GTR. Just as Blue Label whiskey needn’t be ten times stronger than Red Label, or flying first class is not meant to get you there four times faster than the folks in economy. The LFA is not just about the numbers, and trying to define it solely by its price tag versus its performance is like measuring the value of art by the amount of paint that was used to make it. You’re buying a piece of modern history. You’re buying pride. You’re buying everything the number one car company in the world knows. And, if you happen to be one of the exceptionally wealthy 500, you’re buying some pretty serious exclusivity.

So, armed with an extremely exclusive invitation from Lexus Manila, I set out to Goodwood to finally put my own punctuation marks on this controversial story. Now at this point, I’m supposed to go all gushy and start waxing lyrical about how the thrill of driving one of the world’s most expensive super cars awakened that repressed 9-year old boy in me whose dreams of being a race car driver were brutally crushed after being forced to abandon my war-torn home and migrate to a foreign land where I needed to walk 144 miles to school everyday. In the snow. Barefoot. And backwards.

But I wont.

But basically, there are no free rides here. No second chances. If anything, Lexus had to dig even deeper than the competition precisely to make up for the lack of history, racing heritage, character and dodgy electricals that many European marques have in spades just to start on even soil and be judged by a similar yard stick. So ten years ago, they started from scratch.

Lexus was never going to play the cut and paste game here. Besides, the entire project was never about that. It was about controlling every minuscule detail and teaching itself how to make every component better than anyone else – sort of like reinventing the wheel. Or at least the chassis that sits on top of all four of them.

Whereas most super car makers – yes, even Ferrari and Bugatti – will outsource things like gearboxes and carbon fiber, Lexus built both and patented its own unique weaving process that draws on the company’s automatic loom heritage. Using one of only two laser monitored circular looms in the world, Lexus engineers were able to achieve aeronautical grades of carbon fiber that is up to four times stronger than steel and one hundred kilograms lighter than the equivalent amount of aluminum, which they used to construct 65% of the entire car.

When developing the engine, Lexus engineers worked with Toyota’s F1 division to create a totally unique 72 degree angle V10 engine that needed to be as small as a traditional V8, and as light as a conventional V6, yet still produce the earth-moving torque they needed while revving until a fuel cut off point of a soul-splitting 9,500 RPM. Now if that doesn’t take the wind out of you, try and get your head around the fact that the LFA is capable of snapping from standstill to full attention (9,000RPM redline) in six tenths of a second, placing it somewhere in between super bike territory and urban myth.

It revs to the redline so quickly that no conventional cabled tachometer could keep up, which is why they were forced to go with the Playstation-esque, computer generated display to maintain accuracy, as well as give it the ability to change its look depending on which driving mode is selected. In Automatic mode, the tach is at its most docile and flashes up small digits. Normal mode beefs up the font size and boldness. A quick flick to Sport mode transforms the entire look of the display, swapping it from black to white, and nudging the redline up closer to the top of the gauge which, once you open up the taps, makes the numbers seem like years flashing before your eyes.

Punch the throttle in neutral and the illuminated needle sweeps across the digital face of the programmable tachometer like a samurai stricken in anger. The speed of which it does this is incredible, and the sound that it produces is what you imagine the gates of heaven to sound like as it rolls on its castors to let you in. And that’s no coincidence, either.

Knowing full well how important the soundtrack is to any epic adventure, Lexus developed uniquely shaped ribs in the intake manifold that are designed precisely to produce a pleasing engine note. They went on to create two separate ducts that route the intake noise into the firewall from the intake manifold and allow two different octaves of engine music to penetrate the passenger compartment, and then asked Yamaha’s musical instrument division to help tune the engine note the same way sound is tuned in an Ovation guitar.

This, combined with the titanium valves, a carbon fiber torque tube and a dry sump that lowers the center of gravity down to an almost go kart level of 17.8 inches and allows cornering forces of up to 2g before oil starvation, is the kind of attention to detail that would make a jeweler from Tiffany&Co. look like a clumsy 3rd grade art student.

LFA owners may be plonking down the equivalent of a private island to own one, but considering Lexus is still making a loss at that figure, they can always consider themselves development partners of not just the company’s first, but undoubtedly the most comprehensively complete super car in the world. And you can hate them all you like for it, sure, but you’ll be thanking them once that technology gets handed down to the more affordable FT86, which undoubtedly is where Toyota will start balancing out the profit and loss sheet to their favor.

But just as you can’t eat a cook book, you can’t drive a press release, so this is all just corporate chest beating from the PR department until I can get a chance to let it rip around this famous raceway.

First up its 4 laps in an ISF to learn the track. I have a tremendous amount of respect for this car having covered over a thousand miles in one from Los Angeles to Vegas and back, yet throwing one around this track made it feel like a wet couch. The Goodwood circuit is incredibly deceiving on paper, throwing up one high speed corner after another with odd cambers and undulations that can unsettle even the most planted suspensions. The ISF is no slouch, but its humbled by this death ring, which has hardly any run offs, earning it the reputation as the most dangerous track in the U.K.

I’m a little worried as I climb into the LFA; if I couldn’t squeeze the most out of the ISF, what chance do I have with this 560hp, rear wheel drive bullet. Sure I could go slow, but that’s like dating a super model who is willing to go all the way and settling for just holding her hand.

I have around 20 laps to play with so I decide to burn several up to get a bit more familiar. I tell myself I’ll build up slowly until I can get a rhythm and gain more confidence and probably start unleashing hell in the last 5 laps or so.

Rubbish.

By turn two I’ve redlined first, second and third gear and am halfway through fourth, about 50 meters past my ISF braking point before I nail it. The LFA hunkers down and remains dead straight even under the lethal grip of those massive Brembos. There is no nose diving or twitchy rear end and the LFA can pile the speed back on almost as quickly as it can shed it. By the last sector of the first lap, I’m closing in on the 240km/h mark as I brake for the 2nd gear double right hander.

I call up third, fourth, fifth, brush the brakes, roll my foot gently on to the gas and continue to balance the speed through these ridiculously quick corners. It doesn’t accelerate as rapidly as the Pagani Zonda, but it feels a lot more controllable, allowing you to be more accurate with your throttle input and giving you the feeling that you’re driving the car instead of just hanging on to it while keeps attacking forward.

The race tuned steering is so light that it feels almost virtual, which would normally be a problem except for the fact that this is the most accurate I’ve ever used, steering with the precision of a single-seat open wheeler. And just as well because driving the Goodwood circuit at speed feels like threading yourself through the eye of a needle, requiring an extremely steady hand, precise braking, minimal steering inputs and total commitment. The LFA slices through like a scalpel, surgically accurate in the turns and incredibly stable under the bite of those suffocating 390mm six piston carbon ceramic Brembos up front and 360mm four bangers behind that have not shown any signs of fade despite the hammering they’ve been getting.

There’s no body roll to speak of, but the chassis still seems pliant, biting into the corner, absorbing the imperfections and bumps instead of rejecting them with sheer stiffness. It feels lighter and stiffer than the Ferrari California and shares the Ferrari’s predictable handling of a front-engined rear-wheel drive when flirting with the limits of the car.

If there’s only one area I could nit pick on is that Ferrari’s DSG feels much smoother on the upshift. The LFA still uses a sequential manual gearbox that may shift at an F1-level of 2/100th of a second, but its still a single clutch set up which means that each time you interrupt 560 horsepower, it comes back on with a jolt that feels like you’ve been tagged by a defibrillator.

I’m on my third lap. From this moment on, it gets blurry. I’m in “the zone” that race car drivers always talk about. All of a sudden, you are no longer reacting but just doing. Everything becomes reflex. You’re no longer thinking the course but driving it; and I’m not so much driving the car as wearing it. It’s difficult to imagine doing this in any other machine except the LFA. But I can’t help it. This is the best super car I have ever driven and is as close to perfect as you want a car to be.

At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter which side of the fence you sit on, because only those who routinely skip their medication will refuse to admit that the 4.8 liter, V10, 560 horsepower, carbon fiber LFA is a milestone in super car history. We could argue until we’re old and gray about whether it’s better than the Ferraris Porsches, GTRs and Vettes, but that will always be in the eyes of the beholder. Saying it’s better than any super car is subjective; saying its expensive is relative. Driving one, however, is superlative.

Bring on the hate.