Lexus LF-A: the $800,000 road test

It’s not every day you get handed the keys to an $800,000 supercar, but that wasn’t the first surprise. It was the grey Toyota Corolla-like key and the clumsy, separate key fob that first caught my attention.

Surely this is not what you get after shelling out the better part of $1 million? And, as it turns out, it’s not.

This is the spare key. The original one is made of carbon fibre and a piece of art on its own. But this car is so precious that Lexus is keeping the original key under wraps for its eventual owner. Even the clear, pre-delivery plastic that covers the scuff panel in the door is still intact.

Clearly, this is not your average road test – but this is not your average car.

To make one supercar, Lexus actually built two. The company was all set to release the LFA in 2005 after five years of development – and then one of the boffins walked into the office one day and said he reckoned he could build a better one if the body and its structure were made of carbon-fibre instead of aluminium. And so Lexus scrapped that version and started again, building this one from the ground up with the high-tech, high-strength weave.

It also partly explains the price: Lexus isn’t trying to recoup the development cost of one supercar over 500 sales (the capped build worldwide), it’s trying to recoup the cost of two.

At $800,000 it’s not just Ferrari or Lamborghini money, it’s the same price as the best vehicles from those two thoroughbred brands. Is it as good as or better than its similarly priced peers? Few will get to find out.

Lexus held an event for media and customers at the Sandown Raceway in late 2011 – but two laps was more of a recce than an opportunity to explore the car’s potential.

We were lucky enough to have a second crack at Lexus’ first ever supercar and, the road drive proved more telling than two tearaway laps.

With one 24 hour window out of Sydney at our disposal there was really only one option: the Australian mecca of motorsport, Bathurst. Lexus has no plans to race the car in the 12-hour event held there, but the road to Mount Panorama and back is still enjoyable enough – when there’s no traffic.

To miss the worst of it we left after peak hour had subsided. In Sydney, that means after 7pm. Apart from not wanting to endure the bump and grind of gridlock, I didn’t fancy having to fill out forms if someone rear-ended one of only two LFAs in Australia (of an eventual total of 10). Indeed, we even had to take out insurance on the excess because it was so high ($20,000 if you’re wondering).

With the appropriate paperwork signed we were on our way.

First impressions? How easy it is to drive. At idle and at suburban speeds the LFA is relatively quiet; it doesn’t erupt until halfway through the rev range.

Better still is the cool fireworks display every time you switch from auto to manual mode; the perimeter of the digital rev counter dial ‘throws’ sparks that disappear into the centre. It’s dazzling at first, but hopefully is a feature that may make it onto future F-edition Lexus cars.

Another feature we’d love to see more of: the digital dash display goes from black to white in sport mode. It’s almost what you’d imagine the late Apple founder Steve Jobs would do if he had his way with a tachometer.

At the same time as the car goes into Sport mode, the rear wing glides up elegantly to reveal to polished alloy struts. Cool.

The seats are awesome, and fit your frame perfectly despite looking like they’re made for a Sprintcar. The body feels taught, even just negotiating a roundabout. The steering super-direct.

The first difference, however, from my recollection of the track drive is the lack of low-end torque. Unsurprisingly the Lexus’ 4.8-litre V10 engine didn’t spend much time below 3000rpm on the track.

Immediately prior to the Lexus road test I had just handed back a 5.2-litre V10 Audi R8 after a long distance drive over four days, so the LFA’s lack of low end torque was perhaps more pronounced (By the way, the Audi felt as quick, if not quicker, despite costing half as much).

In the meantime, most of my energy was taken up by watching the cars around me, and enjoying soaking up the subtle sounds from the LFA.

At slow speeds and when parking, most cars with this much power sound like you’re moving a racecar into position, as the heavy duty gears mesh. But the same gears in the Lexus sound more like piano wires as they click-clacked into position – despite the rear-mounted, six-speed, robotised manual having two driveshafts running up and down the length of the car.

A quick stop for junk food at Eastern Creek turned into a long show-and-tell session with some local lads. They offered to swap their brightly coloured BMW convertible with our LFA and seemed genuinely surprised that we didn’t take them up on the offer.

What was surprising is that they knew what it was, despite little or no advertising by Lexus.

“It’s the one from Fast Five”, offers one of the hoodlums, referring to the fifth Fast and the Furious sequel. Which just goes to show why product placement in movies and computer games is more effective than regular ads for some cars…

The likely lads also made a profound point: because the LFA is not turbocharged or supercharged, they are allowed to drive this 412kW supercar on their ‘P-plate’ provisional licence. And yet they’re banned from driving a miserly (and relatively lethargic) 77kW 1.2-litre Golf because it has a small turbo for fuel efficiency.

That’s your government at work, folks…

Having declined their swap offer we continued west towards The Mountain. But first we had to negotiate the Blue Mountains.

The roads were empty but the air was full of fog and mist. Visibility extended only as far as the headlights, and even then it was marginal. So what should have been an enjoyable winding road was fraught with a heightened sense of filling out accident claim forms. All I wanted to do was keep it off the wall and make it past the weather.

Thanks to the fog, 40km/h felt like 140km/h such was the thickness of the clouds. And then it vanished.

As we started to descend the western side of the ranges and wind our way down towards Lithgow, the fog lifted, the cloud cleared and the road even started to dry out.

This gave us an opportunity to feel the grip of the tyres, the bite of the brakes and the roar of the engine. Thank goodness it’s not illegal to drive at 100km/h in second gear.

From 3500 to 9000rpm the LFA goes through two distinct stages. Between 3500 and 5000rpm it sounds like a V8 Supercar. From 6000 to 9000rpm it sounds like a Formula One car.

Heaven knows what the farmers near Mount Victoria thought when they heard the LFA. Perhaps they thought Triple 8 Racing’s Team Vodaphone was back with its F1 versus V8 Supercar show.

The stretch of road between Lithgow and Bathurst is straight and boring. It’s at this point I notice one thing missing (and it’s standard on all other Lexus models): cruise control. It’s an unusual omission, especially as the Italians (Ferrari and Lamborghini) have finally embraced it after decades of insisting supercars shouldn’t have the licence-saving feature.

We roll into Bathurst tired and (just a little) emotional. It’s almost midnight and the locals doing ‘blockies’ soon notice the fancy car in town.

We snap a few shots at my request but leave quickly after the photographer determines they are not art (apologies) and head for the reason we came all this way in the first place: Australia’s most famous 6km stretch of road.

We roll up to the track (it’s a public access road to local properties when the races aren’t on) and it’s pitch black, which is what one might expect in the middle of the night. Clearly Bathurst Council cares about the environment and its electricity bill: all the lights were off.

We decide to call it a night and doss down at the hotel on the circuit. In case you’re wondering, yes, it’s nice, but all the rooms are already sold out for 2012’s Bathurst 1000 race.

We get up the next morning to finish off the photography with a Bathurst you can see as opposed to the one the night before, which you couldn’t.

With the shots in the bag and breakfast in our stomachs we head back to Sydney. This time, the road is dry and the visibility is good.

With more time behind the wheel the LFA’s growing on me; I can feel each corner of the car better and we’re getting into the groove. In dog parlance, the LFA has sniffed my hand for a bit, now I can pat it.

What I discover is the chassis is as good as any of the thoroughbreds, and the engine performance is epic, no, thrilling, between 5000 and 9000rpm. This makes the LFA as a whole brilliant in expert hands – but twitchy in the hands of a novice.

The entire experience is one of extreme precision, but not very forgiving of mistakes, which for Lexus at least is ‘on-brand’. But does the LFA have a soul? The jury’s still out on that one.

But, price aside (it should be $400,000, not $800,000), Lexus has at least succeeded in creating a genuine, hardcore supercar.

Now it needs to create one whose performance and price is more accessible to mere mortals.