Lexus F Sport Grade RX 450h

Launched in four trim versions, the Lexus F Sport Grade RX 450h offers sharper handling, sportier performance and oodles of road presence

Toyota’s luxury car maker Lexus has lifted the curtains off the new F Sport Grade RX 450h. The full hybrid SUV has gained sharp new looks, higher levels of equipment and an enticing F Sport trim version to increase its appeal. The 450h range comes equipped with a 3.5-litre, V6 engine that is mated to an electric motor. This gives a combined power output of 343PS. The SUV is also offered with a Sport Drive Mode that modifies the vehicle’s behavior dramatically, offering nimbler responses and less intrusion of traction control and stability control, letting the driver exploit the 450h’s full potential.

New trademark Lexus elements include the spindle shaped grille also seen at the 2013 Lexus GS saloon and the LF-LC concept coupe. Redesigned tail lamps add to the sporty character of the vehicle. The F Sport stands out with a deeper, more vertical front bumper and a dedicated mesh treatment, dark finished 19-inch alloy wheels and F Sport badging.

On the inside, significant tweaks have been made to the trim details. A bespoke steering wheel, incorporating a new selector switch for the hybrid system’s drive modes, and the operation of the remote controller has been revised. There is a tilt/slide sunroof across the whole range.

Toyota had announced that it would launch Lexus in India by 2013. The India bound Lexus SUV will lock horns with the Audi Q5, BMW X3 and Mercedes M-Class. UK prices for the F Sport RX 450h start at £44,495 (Rs 38.68 lakh) on road.

Currently, Lexus plans to bring in the LS 600h saloon and the RX 450h SUV as Completely Built Units (CBU)

Trim Version	Price - on road, UK
RX 450h SE	£44,495 (Rs 38.68 lakh)
RX 450h Luxury	£48,495 (Rs 42.17 lakh)
RX 450h Sport	£51,995 (Rs 45.22 lakh)
RX 450h Premium	£55,495 (Rs 48.26 lakh)

Lexus LFA : First Drive

To understand what makes a Japanese supercar tick, try blagging your way to get behind the wheel of the Lexus LFA and let it make you feel like a hero who can vanquish Vettel! Adil Jal Darukhanawala got to play out his fantasy while making the V10 sing in all its unfettered V10 glory!

Contrary to perception and short lived public memory, the Japanese have made a significant number of sports cars which have been pleasureable, fast and quick, technologically advanced, stylish as well might I add and this form has gone on since the mid-1960s when none other than Toyota made its 2000GT. Of course from there on many others followed especially Honda with its mid-engined NSX while Yamaha did an exceptionally hard core two-seater using the basis of an F1 car with a mildly detuned version of its 3.5-litre V10 F1 engine. As would have been apparent from this small list, the truly outstanding sports cars from the land of the rising sun to carry the tag of a supercar was however thin on the ground.

As such when the news came in slightly more than three years ago of none other than Lexus, Toyota’s luxury brand to make a V10-engined supercar made one reel in disbelief. More so when it was announced that the orders to inculcate a bit of fun to drive and power packed performance came right from the top - from Akhio Toyoda himself. It might have been the bombshell of the decade but unbeknown to many, the project to give the world a Lexus supercar had been on for over six years and a small team under chief engineer Haruhiko Tanahashi had been beavering away on a front mid-engined rear drive supercar packing in many features and technologies culled from Toyota’s massive F1 effort and also a few of their own which the project team were anxious to try out.

The end result is the Lexus LFA, a car with a terrific power to weight ratio, clever aerodynamics with an underwhelming shape to it (probably the only thing which could have been done better I think) but enough on the muscle and the means to use it all which makes this one of the most unassuming of supercars but by that very essence it also puts forth a unique new hard edged performance tool which is precise, sharp, very powerful and most important of all fun to drive. When Toyota put together a full day session just before the Tokyo Motor Show in late November last year, for a group of Indian motoring hacks to experience the LFA in its full no-holds-barred glory, I was glad it had also provided us with the ideal venue to explore what it was capable of - the full length Grand Prix track of the Fuji Speedway just under the shadow of the fabled Mount Fuji.

While the LFA has already adorned the covers of ZigWheels before (refer the 2010 ...... issue), this is the first time we have got to get behind the wheel and put it through its paces. However, jogging the memory banks for the basic configuration would be in order first and here goes. The basis of the car is an all carbon fibre monocoque manufactured by Lexus at its very own Motomachi plant near Toyota city. It is a modicum of super light weight and absolute torsional rigidity of the very highest order at the same time. Add a specially designed naturally-aspirated 4.8-litre V10 engine to the package and let it rest low in the tub way ahead of the scuttle but behind the front wheels (front mid-mounted, get it?).

That this engine came from race car thought is evident in its dry sump layout and this not only helps in being mounted low to the ground but also the clever weight distribution - the radiators are at the rear! - helps with the car’s manners. There is a counter gear at the power take off end of the engine which helps run the prop shaft taking the drive to the transaxle which incorporates a 6-speed automated manual gearbox. 552bhp and 480Nm of torque might not sound much in the days of over 600 horses and a torque nearing locomotive-like four-figures in other cars but then this is the beauty of this machine - doing more from less.

Tipping the scales at a shade under 1,480kg this Lexus though delivers supercar performance as its numbers can testify: 202mph / 323.20km/h at the top end while also blazing away to 100km/h from standstill in a scant 3.7 seconds. The performance is there but the normal fastback looks do deceive which is a good thing because this is a car which can hunt with the hounds and run with the hares, like no other from Japan!

Just like the NSX before it, open the door and you are treated to a gorgeously decked out but highly functional cabin where the textures, the feel, the position, the seats, the pedal box, the steering wheel and the way forward all make you feel mighty comfortable. There is an innate balance in the cabin between form and function and any compromise or excess of one over the other might have been jarring. The Lexus stylists and packaging engineers got this spot on. Having said that the tall transmission tunnel plays the role of the seat separator very efficiently and that TFT instrument panel is a PlayStation delight, the graphics sliding sideways to enable the pilot to make sense of all that is happening around him, very rapidly when tearing through the Fuji Speedway! The manner in which the rev counter display changes from snow white at tick over to hot red when flat out and spinning close to its 9000rpm red line is pure PlayStation genre but then the analogue tachometer was incapable of delivering the inputs as quick as the engine’s ability to rev and thus the geeks were called in to help with a digital interface and this is what they delivered - analogue-style graphics!

 

As did the engine men and the chassis engineers. For one the engine is a gem, truly one of the most outstanding V10s there ever has been with an aural reportoire which is surely, to borrow a phrase from Tanahashi’s team - the joy of angels singing! Yes, really! Thumb the start button (on the steering wheel) and the motor yowls into life with a delightful note played through the triple exhausts at the rear and one gets a feel of the silky smooth motor with one of the best soundtracks in this sanitised age. This is a motor which thrives on revs and with a torque peak of 6800rpm getting there quickly enables one to get the best out of the LFA.

The sad part, if I have to nit pick is the fact that in an age of dual clutch transmissions on most supercars, the LFA’s automated single clutch unit seems a clunker! There are four shift patterns - Auto, Sport, Normal and Wet and while Auto and Normal felt good to begin with, Sport is the one where the engine-tranny match-up works best and if thats not enough to complicate things, Tanahashi’s crew has worked in a menu of seven shift speeds which have everything in it from crazy charged hot heads to laggardly pensioners having doled out the big bucks for such a car. The shifts can take anything from a ponderous 1.0-second slow to a pelvic-bursting 0.2 sec quick change!

What is impressive though is the pleasure part and this is where the LFA bests so many of the world’s best tarmac scorchers. It is the almost telepathic connect between driver and road surface which makes for a wonderful drive experience and the chassis along with its underpinnings eggs you on to push deeper into the corner, gives you the right hints just as the rear tries to slide out of line and then there is that delightful steering and that right throttle to both back it in line or let it drift a bit and powerslide your way through and out of the corner! The steering is mind numbing for its accuracy, race-car like minimum turns lock-to-lock (two) and its weightage given that it is an all electric-assist system! Threading the needle through the Fuji Speedway’s rapid series of left and right flicks with changing topography thrown in saw this fantastic trait in the LFA’s reportoire emerge to the fore repeatedly.

Tanahashi’s team has employed race-car inspired double wishbone front suspension up front while a multi-link set-up works the rear with remote-reservoir monotube dampers doing duty at each wheel. Add to this the car’s 48:52 weight distribution front to rear and while at times when you thought you had overcooked it going into a corner and loading up the the outside, the normal thing would have been to back off the loud pedal but in the Lexus wills you to go progressively deeper on the throttle. From there on with the steering and that delectable weight balance the car could be induced to either do a rip roaring tail out slide or track the corner as if on rails! The brakes are another detail as well with massive carbon ceramic units, 390mm dia six-piston calipered up front and 360mm dia four-pots on the rear on all four corners and when the scenary started brushing past at warp speeds while yet giving a most cozy feel while at the wheel, the brakes were the just as big confidence inducers as was the near impeccable sure footedness of the vehicle.

So much for the race track but yes the three laps were much too less for anyone to get to grips with a machine so supreme in its wide span of capability. Top whack was a no-brainer (I saw 270km/h on the long start-finish straight on each of the three laps I drove) and expected but what was truly shattering was the marvelously damped ride which for a machine with the performance on tap is nothing short of remarkable.

Time then to bring in Tanahashi san for the clincher. “Many enthusiasts and others do put an overwhelming focus and priority on speed for a sports car such as the LFA,” he remarked. “However me and my team approached this from a completely different direction, focusing on driving pleasure as the first priority followed by outright lap times as the next. When a driver is enjoying the highest level of pleasure, so that car is driving fastest.”

Nuff said for I didn’t think I was driving that quick but I was truly in the delirious zone in this Lexus. Never thought I’d ever say this of the brand while making music unlike!

Lexus coming to India by 2013

In what appears to be a confirmation by top honchos of Toyota, the Lexus brand will grace the Indian showrooms by 2013. Executive vice president of Toyota Motor Corporation, Yukitoshi Funo said that Toyota were studying the Indian market for a very long time and their global brand managers think that this is the right time to introduce the Lexus brand here. Toyota will ensure that the Lexus brand be treated as a separate entity from it and will also have separate show rooms. It is likely that existing Toyota dealers would make a beeline for acquiring Lexus franchisees considering the similar setup of servicing standards for both the brands.
Lexus will make a conscious effort to distinguish itself from the other German luxury brands in the country now. The Lexus cars which will be coming to India are LS (S-class, A8 and 7 series competitor) and GS (E-class, A6 and 5 series competitor) while the SUV portfolio will include the RX and LX. However, the smaller IS car wouldnt be coming to India in the near future. Toyota does understand that in order to price the cars competitively, local assembly is required and there are chances that once the initial lot of cars are brought in as CBU, depending on customer demands, Lexus cars would be assembled in India. The company will, however, be up against a tough task since most of its competitors boast of having diesel powerplants, which Lexus doesn't have at this moment. However, the trump card would be the hybrid technology which the company has in the overseas market and has been dubbed as being extremely efficient.

2012 Lexus LFA first drive

If dentists’ drills were silent, people wouldn’t be half as scared of them. It’s the revs I tell you. It’s why the 15,000rpm howl of the R6 is such a wonderful thing. But few cars rev anywhere even close to that. And that, in a word, was the primary reason I was excited about driving the Lexus LF-A. In my tactless sort of bumbling way, I mentioned this to Bert who promptly offered to kill me once I returned from the drive, since he really wanted to drive the Lexus himself and thought my perspective was a bit, er, decayed.

Then some time in the car gave me pause. A chance to have a change of mind. 9000rpm sounds wild when it explodes out of a freakishly light-footed distinctly Japanese V10. The engineers considered other engine formats but rejected the V8 for being too slow to rev, while the V12 evidently suffers from an excess of reciprocating masses. The V10 is perfection, they decided. And when it hits 9000rpm (fuel cut off is actually still higher) it’s pure engineered madness. It’s drunk out of your skull, teetering on a bridge railing singing Born To Be Wild with no clothes on madness. The engineers at Lexus who fashioned this 72 degree (for awesome primary balance) V10 need to be handed a Nobel prize for excitement or be rushed to a padded cell in straitjackets.

The designer should just be chided. Call me jaundiced or cynical but the LFA just isn’t  good looking in that luridly sexy way of the supercar. Spectacular? Sure. Wearing more scoops than an ice cream shop? Naturally. Sexy? Er, no. It’s way too restrained, the body work has fewer curves than my favorite scapegoat, Kate Moss. It’s too restrained, too scoopy-venty. It is properly exotic, at least. This is a carbon-fibre tub. And what isn’t CFRP is aluminium - some 35 per cent of it.

This was further exaggerated by the matte black LFA being used as the lead car for the laps, which out-sexied the yellow photographs-only car as well as the white and red cars we were to drive by a huge margin.

But then you will skip a beat when you cast eyes on the colourful, TFT screen that is the instruments. Another engineering necessity - no speedo needle can swing from idle to redline in 0.6 seconds, something the engine does rather regularly. I also loved the thin, rectangular stalks for wipers and indicators.

What grabs you next is that ingress/egress is easier than many Ferraris/Lambos, and the cabin is proper - cool materials, carbon fibre, leather, heavily bolstered seats and all. But so impressively odd is the placement of everything apart from the steering wheel and the pedal box that the engineers spent a full five minutes with each journalist explaining where stuff was, rather than what to do on track.

Or not to do on track, really. And to be honest, these oh-there’s-no-time-so-two-laps-only drives get old. It’s like Toyota brought us to a Michelin-star-chef-ed restaurant, laid out a spread and then gave one only a teaspoon and said, “Go nuts! Try everything if you can. Don’t hesitate. And be ready to leave this place in, oh, sixty-two seconds.” It sucks harder than the biggest vacuum cleaner in the world. Harder than a giant leech.

Two laps. But those two laps change everything. The redline so high and the first lap is so slow that I have no option but to stab madly at the deliciously made shifter paddles to prod the car into the lower possible gear everywhere and provoke as many revs as I can.
 
The performance is a given. But this is a Lexus. So it isn’t raw. It’s packaged fury. There’s sound insulation and careful tuning that keep the ragged edge hidden. What’s left is a sweet, hair-raising roar that will curdle your blood and bring people running to have a listen. The 1LR-GUE 72 degree V10 makes 560PS and 480Nm of torque easily hitting 100kmph in about 3.5 seconds on its way to over 320kmph. Thankfully, the full-bore gearshifts are joltingly jerky when flat out like a proper supercar - another conscious selection on the part of Lexus rather than purely the result of extreme performance from the automatic sequential six-speed gearbox.
 

Braking is a mad stomp but the car gets all floaty and squirelly into the first turn. Wait, what? It’s the ripples from the F1 cars braking so hard, people. Fuji Speedway is where we’re A’ing the LF. And fresh from the rippled braking zones at the BIC, I know what they feel like and do. It’s no sweat. Carry on braking.
 

Then in mid-corner I discover the Velcro tyres, which can be unstuck by the engine with some provocation and great skill or in my case, by planting a hefty boot on the accelerator at every inopportune moment. In sport mode, you get a short but controllable feeling slide before traction control realises I have lock but its not opposite. That my feeling of controllability is illusory and I’m likely to paint the Armco with a very expensive, limited edition Lexus Future-Advance. So like a good butler, it quietly lights up some warnings on the dashboard, reigns in the engine a bit, and hands the car back to me, “There my lord, I’ve fixed it for you. Again.”

The second lap is faster and I can taste the car now. I can sense its incredible poise in corners, make it explode brutally out of the corners in this alarmingly immediate way and also, sense it squirming around mid-corner in response to my jangly throttle work. An experienced driver would be doing a fluent Paso Doble. I’m just taxing all the mechanical and electronic bits with my epic lack of skill. But hey, I’m impressed. The mad scream from the mid-mounted engine (for forgiveness, rear-engined would be too tickish) as it flashes to the redline down the straight is a shot of heroin. It’s a high, and you want it again and again. You know what, maybe all the glowing international reviews weren’t hyperbole, after all. It truly is most impressive as supercars go. Hell, in five-six more laps, even I’d be hopping up and down! In fifty laps, I might even swap a bull for a smooth L in an oval.

On cue, the black LFA ahead slows, and the orange winker on its right haunch blinks back at me. It’s over. A glowing smile is replaced rapidly by a post-coital grimace of sorts. When the helmet comes off, I return to being a silent passenger in the bus back to Tokyo.

Looking out at Mount Fuji, I ponder the inevitability of a good-looking symmetrical volcano turning up in Japan. Then my thoughts return to the LFA. What an awesome car! It’s a feat, a milestone, a visceral experience bathed in luxury and all that.

But I also grasp that the Italian supercar is hard to beat. That sense of occasion and drama continues to elude the Japanese supercar. Senna’s contribution to the Honda NSX and it’s spectacular, clinical efficiency are storied, but it proved to be a slow seller. And with the LFA, the Jap-supercar remains an oddity.

I guess it is the contradiction of a nation that makes millions and millions of well-loved, inexpensive, right-brain automobiles making what should be sexy, expensive, left-brain object of desire and lust. A pure indulgence. It’s hard to do. Well, at a reasonable price, at any rate. The LFA, for instance, is a limited production model, which means only 500 will be made, the last one to enter production in December this year. I don’t know why that is. Or for that matter, why the LFA should cost three times as much as a Lamborghini Gallardo. Between the amazing car, the two laps and the mind-boggling price, it’s enough to man a drive nuts, I tell you. And if that doesn’t do it, I promise you, the revs will.