Lexus’ line of V8 hot rods ends with a fiery-sounding celebration of carbon fiber. The Lexus F-brand performance car as we’ve come to know it – that exquisite, one-finger-operated salute to the hegemony of German performance cars – may finally be a spent force. With both the IS F and GS F super sedans fading into memory, the subject of this road test – the Lexus RC F Ultimate Edition – is a V8 engine of sorts. Over the past twenty years, these cars have been a wonderfully strange experiment for Toyota’s global luxury brand. Looking for an alternative path to an enthusiastic audience, they were not at all distracted by horsepower races with Munich, Stuttgart or Ingolstadt. Instead, they’ve proven that Lexus knows how to build loud, exuberant and exciting cars: boldly, with dedication – and entirely on its own terms. What’s next for the Fuji Speedway performance entity? There’s talk of an LFA hybrid supercar, and possibly electric models too – but since those won’t look anything like the V8s we’ve come to know, we could hardly let the RC F disappear without a full set of performance figures during the road test and a final noisy explosion down the Horiba MIRA straight.
Lexus RC F ultimate edition
