Conventional wisdom would dictate that the growling, 416-hp IS-F signals some kind of directional change for the silky and mellow Lexus brand, but let us explain why this car does no such thing. One of the pillars of the Toyota Way is "No Waste," expressed in everything from its just-in-time supply chain to its legendary mandate that company executives sharpen their pencils all the way down to the erasers. And to Toyota, there are few things more wasteful than a car that doesn't sell. "No Waste" is why Toyota has made itself better than anyone at researching and testing and analyzing the widest band of customer preference in each segment, better at giving the people exactly what they want. Unlike most other carmakers, which are guided by internal engineering compasses and house style, Toyota is mainly a reactive enterprise, finding hot spots in the market and chasing after them like a terrier after a Grand Am. (Of course, Toyota being Japanese, there is a countervailing impulse, a Yang to the Yin - calculated risks like the Prius and the FJ Cruiser and the Scion brand. But these examples sit on the roadside of Toyota's march toward world domination, categories unto themselves.)

So I laughed obnoxiously in the hushed, dimly lit briefing room when Lexus's VP of marketing said, "The IS-F wasn't part of any carefully planned program. This car wasn't supposed to happen." As much as Lexus wants to think that the IS-F sedan is some fire-breathing aberration in its milk-safe lineup, it fully embodies the mercenary spirit of Toyota, Inc. Here, Toyota is in a particularly target-rich environment - the small and relatively high-volume end of the supersedan category, where the Audi RS4, Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG, CTS-V, and the originator, the BMW M3, lurk. Indeed, all this talk of working outside the system sounds like sandbagging, as if Lexus is managing the press's expectations relative to the competition: If these guys hadn't done their homework here, why would the IS-F eke out a 2-hp advantage over the M3?

Lexus could have shoehorned in the LS600h's 5.0-liter V-8 and transmission, popped in a limited slip, christened it the IS500, and called it a day. But to its credit, Lexus did more. The IS's V8 shares its architecture, VVT-iE variable-valve timing, and combination port/direct fuel injection system with the LS. Unique to the small car, however, is a head scavenge oil pump to keep the engine lubricated at high g loads; titanium intake valves with solid lifters; a low-friction, mirror-polished, hollow camshaft; and a dual-air intake system with a secondary port in the right front wheel well that opens up above 3600 rpm.

Unlike the somewhat predictable engine mods, the reprogramming of the LS's eight-speed automatic is unexpected and groundbreaking. The so-called 8-speed Sport Direct Shift gearbox has two modes: In D, the torque converter is engaged throughout all gear changes to smooth them out (and sap power and time), just as in a conventional automatic. But in manual M mode - controlled by either the gear lever or two blade-like paddles attached to the steering wheel - the converter only twists in first gear, multiplying torque for a fast launch; in gears two through eight the gearbox functions like a two-pedal manual, the torque converter's lock-up clutch providing a direct connection between throttle input and rear-wheel power. In this mode, the IS-F is the fastest-shifting manumatic on the road. It swaps cogs in 0.1 sec, faster than the F1 gearbox in the Ferrari F430, without much bucking or torque interruption - the thing even blips the throttle on downshifts. The ratios between gears three and eight are incredibly tightly spaced and short - to the extent that you question why, in a car with 371 lb-ft of flat torque, you should run through the middle ratios so quickly - but it's the small, stiff gears in this transmission that make such lightning-quick, unmassaged shifts possible. (Also, the Mercedes gearbox only has seven speeds.)

Lexus didn't neglect the IS chassis either, even if the changes here aren't as extensive as those implemented by the F's German competition. The front A-arm suspension has 90 percent stiffer springs and shocks than the IS350, with revised geometry to help mitigate brake dive. In back, the damping and springing rates are up 50 percent, but the rear toe-link bushings are more compliant than the 350's for better toe variation when cornering. Huge 14.2-inch drilled and vented Brembos with six pistons sit under the front wheels, with two-piston 13.6-inchers under the rears.

The sensors in those brakes enable a wide range of functions, bundled together in what Lexus calls Vehicle Dynamics Integrated Management (VDIM), which has three modes. Normal keeps traction- and stability-control on at all times. Sport ups the heft of the electronic power steering, raises transmission shift points, speeds throttle response, and relaxes the linear and lateral slip thresholds of the traction and stability systems. You can also turn the whole thing off - press the button with the sliding car icon once to kill traction control, hold it down for three seconds to snuff out stability control. In all modes, ABS and the electronically controlled brake LSD are always engaged.

Approaching the car, the first things you notice are the huge strakes aft of the front wheels. Then the powerful stance, and the way the turbine-like rims fill the wells. There's even a power bulge at the front of the hood, which makes the car look a little like a beluga whale. Inside, it's a four-seater: two heavily bolstered chairs up front, and a divided rear with a pass-through. There is woven-looking, aluminized composite trim on the center console and doors, and tastefully applied F logos (designed to mimic Turn One at Fuji) throughout.

We drove the IS-F on the sinewy roads of Central California and the dizzying elevation changes of Laguna Seca raceway. On the street, the car is quiet enough to be called Lexus-like, but the ride is anything but. The suspension is very tightly wound, and does not glide over road imperfections like the LS, or even the regular IS. But for all its firmness, the suspension has no rocking memory - no aftershocks scared me into thinking that the California coast was about to crumble into the Pacific. The pedal box is lively, too, with brakes that feel a tad jumpy and overservo'd, and a throttle that, thankfully, feels exactly the same way. The car tips into its power aggressively, and hustles seamlessly through the gears in Drive mode, more perceptibly in Manual mode. Lexus says this car sprints to 60 in 4.8 seconds and onto the quarter mile in 13 flat, but it has been tested at 4.2 and 12.7, respectively. The V8 isn't some high-revving Euro snob: it delivers its power like a howitzer and has the explosiveness and the upper-rpm shortness of breath of an old-school American V8. The sound is glorious, all fourth-order harmonics, and when the engine spins past 3600 revs and the secondary air inlet opens, the induction grumble intensifies to a roar. It's addictive. Less so is the steering, which returns more weight than pure feel. It moves off center with commendable linearity, but doesn't seem alive in your hands.

It's only on the track, with g loads in the tires, that the steering starts telling you all the front wheels' secrets. In fact, it wasn't until the IS-F hit dusty Laguna Seca, one of the most diabolical and undulating tracks in North America, that the car fully woke up. (It probably didn't hurt that the car's handling was developed here, as well as at Fuji, the 'Ring, and Paul Ricard.) The chassis is utterly stable through the twisting two-story drop of the famed Corkscrew, holding its line beautifully and shifting its weight expertly through the rest of Laguna's ascents and dips. The brakes are easy to modulate when you're deep into the pedal and they did not fade after two hours of hot laps - if these brakes were any better at retardation, they'd have their own show on Spike TV. But for all their power and all the fancy suspension geometry that tries to keep the front end from diving, there's no getting around the car's 3780 pounds or its 54/46 front weight bias. Under heavy, ABS-active, slam-you-into-your-seatbelt braking, the car's front loads up and the rear goes light and twitchy.

Speaking of weight, the ton of it up front means that you need to be patient with the car on turn-in - not Mustang patient, mind you, but the bow needs to be planted if you want to make your line and not understeer wide of it. If you go into a turn well set up but just a little too hot, however, VDIM helps. Its transitions between traction and stability control are invisible and its Sport mode does a superb job of allowing some slip angle while keeping you out of the gravel. On the track, VDIM is less satisfying in Normal mode, even though interventions are subtle, too. In Everything Off mode (also know as Holy Crap! mode), well, it's like driving on ice - a wide neutral phase soon becomes a large amount of oversteer. Even with everything off, the LSD does still help out a bit, providing some braking to a slipping wheel, and the coolest thing about this limited slip is that it can feed in brake and throttle at the same time.

The fact that this car is so capable, so fast, and so unflappable is a testament to the seriousness with which it was developed. It was shot like an arrow into one of the most competitive segments in autodom, and it can hang there. No, its chassis wasn't completely reengineered like an M car or even the new C63, but because the IS shares its architecture with the larger, V8-bearing GS, it gets away with it. Feelwise, the IS-F splits the difference between the bipolar M3 and the other parenthesis of the category, the C63, which is the very model of supersedan stoicism. It strikes its own elegant balance of the aggressive and the balletic, the stout and the playful. This car is better than it has any right to be when you consider it's within spitting distance, dynamically, of the race-bred giants in its segment. Moreover, this Lexus has the attention of all the Evo and STI drivers who, up until this car, have had no true Japanese supersedan into which to graduate. Add in that its price will undercut the M3 at an estimated $59,000, and you have a car that adheres to another precept of the Toyota way: "Be Late, But Be Great."

You can fix a squeaky speaker and put a new fuse in the electrics (faults engineered in to give the car character?), particularly with Lexus's great customer service, but it's much harder to give a car soul. To do that you have to understand the passion that makes a car fun to drive, fun to own and worth £50k. BMW has known how to do that for years, and more recently so have Audi and Mercedes. And now, for the first time with the IS-F, Lexus has too.

What does the F stand for? Fun, that's what.

Lexus IS-F

By Ben Whitworth

First drive

07 February 2008 13:34


CAR's rating : 4 STARS

The new Lexus IS-F performance flagship arrives here this April primed to take on its BMW M3 and Mercedes C63 AMG rivals. Even its £51,000 price tag (M3 £50,725, C63 AMG £52,567) puts it deep into enemy territory. It may not have the aspiration strengths played on so heavily by M Division and AMG, but that hasn't stopped Lexus wheeling out a pretty formidable rival to rock the Teutonic triumvirate.

Heritage or no, the F has the power, the performance and the looks to face up to any competitor – a track-tuned 417bhp 5.0-litre V8, an eight-speed paddleshift transmission, tweaked wishbone front and multilink rear suspension and steering and Brembo developed brakes, all wrapped in out-my-way sheetmetal.

The F doesn't photograph particularly well, tending to look oddly proportioned and slightly bulbous from some angles, but in the metal it looks mean and sharp – drink in those sinister graphite 19-inch lightweight BBS alloys, vast brake discs and six-pot calipers, the 25mm lowered ride height, blistered wheel arches, that power-domed bonnet, those four distinctively stacked exhaust pipes and the air vents behind the front wheels. It looks both restrained and menacing, a car with a real fast lane-clearing aura, although I felt horribly cheated when I looked closer and saw the four drainpipes were dummies. The real exhausts end just short of the faux pipes, and the air vents are also false.

Tell me about the Lexus IS-F's engine
Borrowed from the LS600h, the all-aluminium engine features a raft of motorsport upgrades including cylinder heads developed by Yamaha Racing, direct injection, electrically driven variable valve timing, titanium valves, a dual air intake system, sintered conrods and a fuel surge tank and oil scavenge system to feed the engine during high speed bends. Result? Lexus’s most powerful engine – a sledgehammer that develops 417bhp at 6600rpm and 373lb ft of torque at 5200rpm. Enough muscle to rocket the 1700kg IS-F to 60mph in 4.8seconds and onto a limited 168mph top speed. Plenty of grunt to worry its rivals.

FYI, the F in the Lexus’ badge doesn’t stand for fast or the F word – it stands for Fuji, the hallowed Toyota-owned speedway circuit at the base of Mount Fuji where the IS-F’s high-speed dynamics were honed. The development and engineering was undertaken by a small skunkworks team spearhead by top Lexus engineer Yukihiko Yaguchi.


Does the IS-F really have an eight-speed transmission?
It certainly does, and anyone thinking that sounds like technical overkill will be proved wrong within the first mile of driving, because it’s a real gem. Like the engine the transmission has been borrowed from the LS600h, rebadged Sports Direct Shift and been given a massive overhaul to prepare it for its F application. In manual paddleshift mode it only uses a torque converter in first gear, with full lock up in second onwards, and shifts take just a tenth of a second – quicker Lexus claims than any current double-clutch transmission, and almost as fast as a Ferrari F30 Scuderia’s gearbox. And as you’d expect, it blips that electronic throttle body with millimetric precision on downshifts for perfectly matched engine revs. And the shifters themselves move with a lovely tactile quality.

What else has been done to the F over a stock IS?
Pretty much everything. To keep you having fun and out of trouble, the F is fitted with a three-stage VDIM system – that’s Vehicle Dynamics Integrated Management. This holistic dynamic package brings together the anti-lock brakes, traction control, limited slip differential and stability electronics to work as one cohesive unit, and the system also governs the gearshift speed and the degree of electrical assistance for the steering.

In Normal mode, the steering is light, gearshifts are creamy smooth and at the hint of wheelspin, the electronics wade in to help you out. In Sport, the steering weights up, the gearshifts are incredibly quick – yet still unerringly smooth – and you can play the oversteer hooligan long and hard before the system finally intervenes. There’s a third Snow setting for poor weather conditions. Oh, and don’t forget the F’s Brembo-developed anchors – 360mm ventilated and cross drilled discs with six-pot calipers up front and 345mm discs with two-pot calipers at the back – the uprated suspension, significantly stiffened chassis and the recalibrated electrically assisted steering.


I presume the IS-F goes like the clappers?
You’re damn right. This Lexus is searingly quick. Flick the VDIM into sport, hold the F on the brakes, stamp on the accelerator and the Lexus bullets away like a rocket sled. The combination of the engine’s red-line appetite and the transmission’s ability to machine gun its way through its tightly stacked gears means there’s no let up in the F’s vivid acceleration, and whipping through the first four gears is an absolute blast.

But revert the VDIM to normal, and let the gearbox handle things itself and the Lexus can be trundled along in traffic smoothly and effortlessly – much as you’d expect from a Lexus.

Lexus spent a lot of time and money fine tuning the engine’s vocals – up to 3600rpm, the V8 wuffles and rumbles with a muted and downplayed muscularity, but above that, the induction noise drops and octave and the F does a massively addictive impression of a Nascar racer on full charge. It the kind of noise that will have you windows down and seeking out tunnels…

Despite that gorgeous rev-happy V8 and ultra-rapid transmission, the Lexus never for one moment feels even slightly uncouth or edgy. The engine may bellow, the tyres may yelp and the gearbox may rip through its cogs, but the F always feels polished and urbane. It can rocket along roads at thoroughly illegal speeds without ever feeling tricky or snappy. For some buyers looking for raw white-knuckle entertainment, that may go against the grain, but this welcome edge of civility in normal day-to-day driving.

So it’s fast in a straight line, but can the IS-F do corners?
The F’s electrical steering doesn’t exactly let the dynamic side down, but it’s a little short on feel and backchat although no worse than an RS4’s. It is direct, though and there’s an immediate and accurate response to small off-centre inputs through the thin-rimmed wheel. Once you grow accustomed to the slightly artificial feeling, though, the F can be poured cleanly and accurately down a favourite road.

The F also rides with a fluency and poise that will leave most M3 and C63 drivers green with envy. There are no trick adjustable dampers or active anti-roll bars, but the firmly tied down ride rarely feels brittle or harsh, and some might even find it too soft for such a performance package – the back end can really squirm about if you get on the power early out of tighter corners, but for around town and on regular commutes – arguably where the F will spend most of its time, the compliant ride quality is spot on. The brakes also deserve a standing ovation – as well as effortlessly dealing with any amount of speed thrown at them, they’re also full of feel, allowing you to repeatedly lean on them right up to the point the anti-lock intervenes.


So what’s not to like?
The cabin is a bit of a let down. Sure, it’s stuffed with enough gear to satisfy the most sybaritic driver - active bi-Xenons, satnav, ten airbags, a pre-crash safety system, adaptive cruise control and a fine Mark Levinson sound system are standard features, with only a sunroof as an option – but the centre console has been shotgunned with buttons, there’s little coherence between the hues of the plastics used, the fonts for the labels and the size of the buttons. And rather than use universally understood symbols, every button has its function written on it, resulting in a dash with more words than a Thomas Hardy novel. Rear accommodation is hardly generous and the F also seems to bing and bong endlessly at you, telling you off for opening the door or not putting on your seatbelt the nanosecond you get in the car. Ultra cool blue instrument needles and excellent chairs aside, it just doesn’t feel particularly special inside.

Verdict
With a razor sharp blip of its screaming V8, the F single-handedly alters Lexus’ image. It makes Lexus interesting, injecting a welcome and much needed dose of character into the brand. Despite its lack of motorsport heritage and track-based pedigree it looks, feels, goes and stops like a bespoke model rather than a go-faster version of an existing model. It’s a very credible gatecrasher to the German super saloon party and effectively breaks their stranglehold on small fast executives. For many potential owners, simply not being German will be a good enough reason to buy it. And with only 150 earmarked for the UK this year, and that allocation unlikely to change, it will be a rare sight, too. That said, there are already around 45 confirmed orders in the UK for the F according to Lexus UK boss Miguel Fonseca.

How Lexus will reconcile the IS-F with its carefully cultivated green credentials remains to be seen but think of it this way – by having both an award-winning line-up of hybrids and this blood-spitting muscle car for purists, surely Lexus is enjoying two bites of the cherry?