LFA [Official] Lexus LF-A Supercar (Production Version)

[Levi68]

The only car that looks good in 911 GT3 color.

 

[DeDe]

The only car that looks good in 911 GT3 color.

... is the 911 GT3 RS.

This is fail - from the owner.

 

[Bartek S.]

Wow.... thys car must be ordered by Paris Hilton.

 

[hoffmeister_fan]

Wow.... thys car must be ordered by Paris Hilton.

nah, she either has a white or a yellow one, I can't remember right now which one. Surprisingly, I thought Barbie would of gone with the Passionate Pink.

 

[Guibo]

I think that car will look fine once we see some better-quality pictures. It's good to see some more creative colors coming out. I'd personally have gone with a black or tan interior and dark calipers. This is a photochopped image that gives a close approximation of that color, I think.

 

[330CIZHP]

That is why I was holding judgement since I wanted to see the color in proper light (and also with the spoiler deployed). I personally think this picture looks good. I would like to see it in proper sunlight to make a final verdict of whether it is a fail or not.

I think that car will look fine once we see some better-quality pictures. It's good to see some more creative colors coming out. I'd personally have gone with a black or tan interior and dark calipers. This is a photochopped image that gives a close approximation of that color, I think.

 

[hoffmeister_fan]

mmmmmmm.....can't decide, they all look so good.

Lexus plays us like a fiddle with its LFA quartet

 

[Levi68]

All look good until the rims are not chrome.

 

[Tarek]

Still you can't go wrong with black.

 

[Monster]

Blue is the way to go.

 

[hoffmeister_fan]

Metallic dark blue or metallic gray with darkened rims and red or gold calipers to give it a little bit of pop. Yeah, that's the ticket for me. Although, I do find the yellow to be rather striking, and usually I'm not one for loud colors.

 

[-=Hot|Ice=-]

Blue is the way to go.

#Winning.

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[Levi68]

I like that combo. My favorite colors for the LFA are Pearl Blue and Pearl Red with interior Cream and Black and Blackish-Brown finish. All exterior plastics and the the rims I'd like them in Gloss Black.

 

[330CIZHP]

Can't seem to figure out if this is still the early yellow prototype or a production LFA.

 

[330CIZHP]

Lexus LF-A Nürburgring (2012) CAR review | Road Testing Reviews | Car Magazine Online

Verdict

In many ways, the LFA is Japan’s Bugatti Veyron and it’s a very, very impressive machine indeed, one that I’d have happily lapped until I crashed or ran out of petrol. Here’s to Naruse-san, then – and to the thought that brilliance like this with filter through to cheaper Toyota sports cars in the future.

Lexus LF-A Nürburgring (2012) CAR review

By Ben Barry

First Drives

13 February 2012 13:30





Back in June 2010, right in the middle of the Toyota unintended acceleration scare, Lexus LFA test driver Hiromu Naruse died when his LF-A Nürburgring ploughed into a 3-series carrying BMW engineers on the 410, one of the public roads outside the Nürburgring.

Toyota sources say Naruse-san didn’t appear to have been wearing his seatbelt and appeared to have been driving on the incorrect side of the road and that, because it was an early development hack, safety systems such as the airbags and so on weren’t operational.

It was a terrible tragedy compounded by terrible timing; it would have been understandable if Toyota had swept this entire project under the carpet. Yet a year later we’re back at the Nurburgring Nordscheife, about to drive the LF-A Nurburgring on the track that gave it its name.

What's new on the Lexus LF-A Nürburgring?

The standard LF-A is an incredible car with some incredible packaging – its front/mid-engined, naturally aspirated V10 that drives the rear wheels through a transaxle. There’s also a carbon monotub, carbon roof, bonnet and spoiler, plus glassfibre side panels (the planned carbon panels didn’t lend themselves to the required Lexus paint finish, so a compromise was reached) while the radiators are located behind the rear wheels and ancillaries like the battery and washer bottle are carefully packaged within the wheelbase to help handling – or, as Toyota puts it, to minimise the moment of inertia.

Only 500 LF-As will be built at a price of around £346,000, but of that 500 a further 50 will be the Nurburgring special edition. It costs - gulp - £411,752.

Changes for the LF-A Nürburgring are small but significant – the leather, electrically adjustable chairs are ditched for fixed-back Recaros, the regular 265/35 ZR20 Bridgestone Potenzas are swapped for same-size, same-make RE070s – a kind of trackday tyre with bigger tread blocks that are less prone to flexing under duress.

Elsewhere there’s an extra 11bhp for the V10, which is, says Toyota’s Duncan McMath, down to ‘a kind of super blueprinting, really paying attention to the seal on the piston ring, that kind of thing’.

Changes to the chassis on the LF-A Nürburgring

There’s also a 10mm ride height drop, plus carbon door cards, and a larger front splitter and new canards (the little winglets either side of the front bumper). There’s also a fixed rear wing which ditches the bulky actuator of the automatically deploying standard spoiler and, along with the lighter seats, accounts for much of the 10kg weight saving. Together with the other aero mods, it generates around 30% more downforce.

What an incredible car this is. And what an incredible place. I’ve previously done only two laps of the 21km Nordscheife, so it’s safe to say I’m feeling a tad nervous when I fire the engine and listen to its warm woooooo at idle build into a yelpy, F1-like scream as I head into the first corner and pull for another gear at a beserk 9000rpm.

But the balance instantly feels trustworthy, the front/mid-mounted engine ensuring there’s minimal understeer while still providing the easier-to-manage feel of an engine placed ahead of the driver when you start to really push yourself at a fast, dangerous place like this. And I say ‘yourself’ advisedly – prior to my run I went out for a passenger lap with a Toyota test driver who was absolutely on it and, the very next day, posted a record-breaking 7min 14sec lap.

So, I push myself, and perhaps not so much the car’s limits, which no doubt explains why I don’t notice the improvements in downforce over the standard car I’d driven earlier – I suspect I’d have to get much more comfortable with the car and the track and push harder to bring that into play.

Still, I do notice how much more securely the bucket seats grip you, how much harder you can lean on the front tyres. The rest, really, is as per the standard car (which means you could pretty much achieve the same affect by fitting the seats, tyres and springs to a stock LF-A).

I like how firm the brake pedal is and how endlessly able the carbon ceramic discs feel. Despite the 10mm drop, the dampers are still shared with the standard car too, and they’re nicely compliant on this circuit, allowing enough rebound and compression movements as the car goes light over fast crests and, well, compresses into hollows – too firm and the car would skip about. The steering is light with a consistence resistance as you wind on more lock, and the gearshift is… still not quite right. Supercar makers such as Ferrari and McLaren have moved the game on with rapid-fire but silky smooth dual-clutch autos, exaggerating the inescapable sense that this automated manual still feels tardy. And, despite the shift speed falling from 0.20sec at the car’s launch to 0.15sec now, it’s still the weakest link.

The thing is, though, a flawed shift doesn’t really sour this experience.

Verdict

In many ways, the LFA is Japan’s Bugatti Veyron and it’s a very, very impressive machine indeed, one that I’d have happily lapped until I crashed or ran out of petrol. Here’s to Naruse-san, then – and to the thought that brilliance like this with filter through to cheaper Toyota sports cars in the future.


CAR's rating *****

Handling *****

Performance *****

Usability ****

Feelgood factor *****

Readers' rating *****

 

[Levi68]

Some renders:

Not a Lexus but based on it. I'd love such an Alfa even more.

 

[330CIZHP]

I had nothing much to do so I watched porn. The model is called LFA.

Nothing new but I am never tired to see again and again the same videos.

Since you seem to be craving those videos, here is some new stuff for you, Levi.



Delivery at Erin Park Lexus in Canada:

How Lexus shocked the world in 7 minutes and 14 seconds.

This is a tale of a supercar, three passionate men, and a record-setting lap—all played out on perhaps the most challenging motor circuit in the world.

The supercar is, of course, the Lexus LFA, and the men are Lexus Chief Engineer, Tanahashi Haruhiko; development supervisor, Naoaki Ito; and test driver, Akira Iida.


And the record? Why that would be last September’s LFA lap time of 7 minutes, 14 seconds around the north loop of Germany’s legendary Nürburgring racing circuit.

But that’s the end of this story—so let’s start at the beginning.

NOT ABOUT THE RECORD

The north loop, or Nordshleife, is a unique motor sports venue—a dense concentration of driving challenges that auto manufacturers use to test their performance cars.

Over the years, the top, power-oriented automakers have been tracking their lap times in a quiet game of one-upmanship—and everyone closely watches each other’s results.

“The Nürburgring was a dojo for us,” explains Chief Engineer Tanahashi, using the Japanese term for a revered martial arts training house. “It was the best place in the world for the vehicle to train.”

It’s here that the team has been fine-tuning the LFA every six months since 2004, and it’s here that the team has recently been developing the LFA into a new performance package—The Nürburgring Package, available this year—in which the tires, suspension, and aerodynamics are all enhanced.

However, while justifiably proud of his team and the LFA’s evolution, Tanahashi has been uncomfortable with a focus on breaking records.

“Many people judge vehicles purely on records,” he explains. “But that is not how Lexus engineers think.” For Tanahashi, tuning the LFA at Nürburgring was about furthering his goal of a making a genuinely fun-to-drive supercar.

THEN AGAIN, IT IS ABOUT THE RECORD

Akira Iida’s thinking, however, is different. Iida is a pro driver, and his world centers on proving himself and his vehicle—against the clock and against other drivers.

“My goal through all of this was for the LFA to be the top among production vehicles,” he says. “We spent a lot of time considering how to make this new performance package different. But to be convinced, to visualize what we’ve accomplished, outsiders need numbers. Therefore, we needed to get the [record] time.”


At the beginning of last September, the time to beat—for a single north-loop lap in a production car on commercial tires—was 7 minutes and 20 seconds.

Sitting spiritually between Tanahashi’s engineering viewpoint and Iida’s competitive spirit is Naoaki Ito, leader of the LFA technical development team and supervisor of the Nürburgring tests. His view strikes the balance:

“The LFA has tremendous potential that is unimaginable to some,” he says. “And it’s important to realize that we developed the LFA with an emphasis on overall sensual performance, not just attacking a lap record. Nevertheless, the performance of the new package would be the result of continual efforts from all of our tests, and we wanted to confirm this ability at least once.”

VICTORY ON THE NORTH LOOP

So for Ito, beating the 7:20 mark in the waning minutes of the team’s 2011 Nürburgring testing would be a good indicator, but not an all-consuming target. There were too many variables over which they had no control, from temperature and humidity to the presence of other test vehicles on the circuit.

But Iida, the driver, saw this as a prime opportunity—the last one for six months—to send shockwaves through the auto world, and so he took the bold step of suggesting to Chief Engineer Tanahashi that he change his driving approach.

“There is an accepted theory on how to drive a sports car,” Iida says. “But I thought I could not break the record if I followed it. I had an idea, and I asked Mr. Tanahashi to let me try it.”

Iida’s plan: activate Vehicle Dynamics Integrated Management (VDIM) on his test run. This was a bold move. Conventional wisdom holds that VDIM, while excellent for normal driving, is an impediment to maximizing a car’s performance on a motor racing circuit. For this reason, enthusiasts typically disable it when driving on a track. But Iida’s plan was to use the system to his advantage.

His reasoning was sound, though—the LFA’s VDIM is the most sophisticated Lexus has ever developed. And after all, the Nürburgring is essentially a collection of streets and highways—precisely what the technology was made for.

And, as the auto world now knows, Iida’s gamble worked. The LFA lapped the Nordshleife in a blistering 7:14, shaving six seconds off the previous mark.

For Iida, behind the wheel, the performance represented all he’d hoped for.

“I just felt a sense of unity with the car,” he says. “I was concentrating so hard, I didn’t check the time until the final straight. Then, when I saw it, I started crying with happiness and clapping—not for me, but for the car, and for what we had achieved together. When I reached the team, they had tears of joy as well.”

 

[Levi68]

“I just felt a sense of unity with the car”

This is what an accomplished car must be, just like the Katana must not be a weapon but the extention of you arm.

 

[330CIZHP]

This is what an accomplished car must be, just like the Katana must not be a weapon but the extention of you arm.

Yes, the car should be inspiring confidence in the driver's mind to make him push the car to its limits and not the other way around.

What I really see here is the sharp differences in the approach of how Akira Iida and the chief engineer define "greatness". While, the chief engineer insisted LFA was about the experience and emotions of driving and not about the numbers, the competitive spirit and ability to measure greatness through numbers as a professional racer for Akira Iida was the yardstick in his mind.

 

[Levi68]