i'd take that gutted lambo. i don't like the front end of lexus and overall, not convinced. but then, i can't afford it anyways.

 

Do they? Show me some production numbers and prices.
People with real money buy something less obvious than Breitling.

That was with traffic, moron. Apples vs oranges.

It should be half the price of an LFA (it's more than half price, BTW). It's produced in greater numbers; 2 years ago, they'd already produced #3000. The chassis is steel. The V12 has been around since the Paleolithic. When Autocar says the LFA is built better than anything Italian, I'm pretty sure that includes the Murcielago, which is a far cry from something like a Zonda.
Being rated highly and 4th in eCOTY doesn't mean it's every bit as involving or responsive as the LFA. It finished behind the 599 GTB, which they described as being more nimble than the Lambo. Now, which front-engined GT from Japan has lately been drawing comparison against the 599, and coming out ahead in terms of agility, nimbleness, and involvment? Oh, that's right. It's the LFA.

And let's get something straight: you claimed straight up that BOTH Autocar and Evo complained about the LFA's rear end, when the reality is that NEITHER of them complained about it. In fact both of them said the opposite: it's controllable. You can either have it slide on your whim, or not. The choice is yours. It's that adjustable. They weren't complaining. They were complimentary. Too bad your dumbass couldn't make the distinction.

You are too stupid and biased to understand the point of LFA development on the 'Ring.
The Scuderia is also meant to be a performance car for the track, but the ACR hands it its *** for far less money. By your "logic," Scuderia = big waste of money for unwitting asshat suckers. Remember, you can't consider anything like build quality or anything outside of performance numbers: that alone determines what a car's price should be, according to you. The Scuderia is a waste of aluminum and carbon.


Maybe it's just their F1 mentality.

Their F1 mentality is to persuade customers to not submit cars for testing? WT....F? Is this the same mentality that *****ed about Hamilton's move on Kimi at Spa? Or the one that had Schumacher "crashing" during Monaco qualifying? I can't remember McLaren ever persuading customers to not submit cars for testing.


If they took back roads it wouldn't be any different to the track. Who's to say the wheels weren't slipping anyway?

Yes, it would be different from the track. On a public road with traffic, they're not likely to be driving 10/10ths the whole way; give them some credit for being more responsible than that. And who the hell jumps from a winding road right onto the rollers? That's retarded. There would be formalities to take care of (paperwork with the dyno operator, securing the vehicle, photo shoot setup, etc). Not to mention the Ferrari crew would make damn sure the tires were not overheating if that was a problem. They'd want the engine to cool down too.
All of your conjecture is pretty much shot down by Evo themselves suggesting soft tires. Are you saying Evo don't know what they're talking about? Why didn't they mention the GT3's MPSC's chunking when they dynoed it, or the 600+ hp Lingenfelter Z06, both on the same dyno?

 

Yeah, of course they do, so long as it fits for LFA argument.

Always an excuse.

Blah, blah, blah.

Controllable after it's gone. Too late in my book.

ACR - unliveable suspension, MPSCs (slicks with some small scrapes in them), huge downforce package.


Yes Guibo, all Ferraris are slow really, Ferrari have just conned people into believing they're fast.

Aware of the traffic situation were you? Was there definitely traffic? I'm sure a frequent customer like Evo goes through the formalities everytime. If MPSCs don't chunk, then no tyre will because MPSCs are soft as liquid ****.

 

very cool writeup here...
http://jalopnik.com/5388538/2011-lex...yline=true&s=i

(an nsxprimer has bolded the bits that he found interesting)

You've probably been bewildered by how much attention one car from a previously maligned automaker is getting on this and other enthusiast sites. But the attention we've paid pales in comparison to the attention to technical detail Toyota's displayed in the design and construction of the LFA. The car's gestation has taken nearly a decade not because the program had problems or limited resources, but because Toyota decided to design and build nearly every element of the LFA, its first ever supercar, in-house. Where most companies — Bugatti, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche included — contract out things like gearboxes and the design and construction of carbon fiber components, Lexus chose to teach itself how to make those things better than anyone else, then build its own tools in order to make them.


Take the carbon fiber, for instance. To make the LFA's, Toyota created one of only two circular looms in the entire world, then used it to simultaneously weave one tube of carbon inside another. They built this system just to make the A-pillars on the car.

This all sounded like little more than corporate grandstanding to us. It's the largest car company on earth patting itself on the back for being able to use the money it got selling the automotive equivalent of beige orthopedic shoes to build some fancy tools.

That attitude lasted all the way to turn 6 at the Homestead Speedway road course. An over enthusiastic application of the sharp throttle had the 552 HP, 4.8-liter V10 spinning rapidly towards its 9,500 RPM redline and the tail sliding out towards the grass. Normally that'd have been an oh-****-I'm-going-to-break-a-$400K-car moment, especially in an unfamiliar supercar, but in the LFA it barely requires conscious correction as it just blended into rocketing down the following straight at three-figure speeds. In fact, oversteer in the LFA doesn't feel so much like oversteer as it does like the rear tires are sitting on castors and being pushed around by a couple of assistants. There's no body roll, no drama, just complete communication and smooth recovery. The reason for that? The impossibly **** approach Toyota took when building the LFA.

The LFA has an unprecedentedly low center of gravity of 17 3/4" — located directly beneath the steering wheel's rim. So far a conventional attribute executed perfectly, but how that CoG got there is way more complicated. First, the engine is located way back in the engine bay and mounts to a 6-speed rear-mounted transaxle through a carbon torque tube. The oil coolers are in the front fenders, while the radiators are at the rear to aid weight distribution, they're fed by the shoulder scoops. That creates a 48% front, 52% rear distribution for the 3263 Lb curb weight. That accounts for the CoG's position front-to-rear, but not vertically. That was achieved by using a world's first counter gear to raise the relative height of the torque tube, allowing the engine to be mounted incredibly low in the car, accounting for the CoG's height.

Of course, that's still only part of the story. The rigid drivetrain assembly (engine, torque tube, transaxle) is connected to the car by four mounts positioned at the geometric extremes of the unit. With no twist in the assembly due to torque, this arrangement eliminates the effect of power delivery on the chassis, there's no torque reaction.

You see where this is going?

Of course, the reason I was over aggressive with the throttle is that the engine revs extraordinarily quickly. From idle, it can be bouncing off the 9,500 RPM fuel cut off in just 6/10ths of a second. That's thanks to an incredibly low reciprocating mass, but achieving that wasn't simple either. They used technology developed by Toyota's F1 program to develop the block, for example, which was cast in the same foundry, using the same technique as the F1 engine. The same goes for the gearbox. The paddle-shifted hydraulically actuated 6-speed features a traditional H-pattern over the more popular dual clutch design because it was determined that the two clutch plates of the latter would negatively impact that low reciprocating mass. Shift speeds are adjustable, taking just 2/10ths of a second a their fastest, but can be slowed to "smooth" for everyday driving; at their fastest, they're anything but.


Transitioning off the incredibly powerful brakes — 15 1/3" diameter carbon metallic discs at the front with Brembo Monoblock 6-piston calipers — and onto the super sensitive throttle isn't currently as smooth as easily driving on the edge of grip requires. But these LFAs are pre-production prototypes and will be continually refined before production begins December 2010. Lexus plans to "break the molds" after just 500 LFAs and plans to build each car for a customer's own bespoke requirements. The company half-jokingly estimates that there's "30 billion" potential combinations of spec.

 

I stole this off-of someone else as well as it's stated perfectly.

Posted on another forum.

"If for one minute, you guys, especially image-conscious people here in the US, would put aside what you think Toyota's place is in the universe and what they should do or not do, consider this.

If dozens of viable back-street, inexperienced, underequipped, understaffed, underfunded newcomers like Pagani, Ascari, Koenigsegg, Noble, Spyker and the like can impress you to death with $500K-$2M cars, why can't Toyota, with what is probably the most advanced engineering knowhow in the world and facilities no other manufactrer could dream of having, come up with a vehicle like the LF-A and be treated on the merit of the car and not on the silly image you might have of it ? This is an argument I use with all the idiots F, L and P-car fanatics who love to knock the GTR.

The LF-A is clearly a money-losing proposition for Toyota, that will showcase its technology and help consolidate its place in the industry. (I don't own a Toyota but you get sick of listening to image-followers who judge products mainly on their image and what their effect is on their nextdoor neighbors, before they get the opportunity of evaluating, let alone seeing the darn thing)"

 

right now the gt-2 and lfa are tied, it seems to be not a big margin in people that want a gt-2 to a lexus lfa...strange

 

How can you compare ANY turbocharged car to a naturally aspirated one? Wouldn't ther former always be a bargain? I think people are just making excuses to discredit the car.

 

You must have been dropped on your head as an infant if you think lapping with traffic is the same as lapping on a completely closed and clear track.

WTF does "controllable after it's gone" even mean? By definition, if it's gone, it can't be controlled.
Would your book be entitled "GT-R: The Second Coming of Christ"? Or "Memoirs of an Idiot D'ouchebag"?

And faster on a track than the Scuderia, aka waste of aluminum. Who gives a crap if it has huge downforce and unliveable suspension. When you drew up your definition of what constitutes a car's "worth," you didn't mention either of those things. You said only performance matters, specifically performance/$. Only objective numbers count. By your logic, the Scuderia is a sh1tty waste of money. I can't believe you'd defend such overpriced garbage.

Was that stupidity masquerading as sarcasm? I never said Ferraris are slow.

Even if traffic is light, only a moron goes at 10/10ths around every corner on a public backroad simply because you don't know what's around the next corner. So what you're saying is that not only are Evo's performance numbers questionable (Mac F1 faster than Enzo), they're a bunch of irresponsible idiots too.
And why wouldn't they go through the formalities? You think the dyno facility would just plop any megabuck Ferrari on they dyno without paperwork? Without securing it? They'd be in a load of legal trouble if anything happened to the car (or bystanders injured as a result). You can bet the Ferrari crew on hand was checking to make sure everything was running optimally, and that does not include a heatsoaked engine.
Thanks for confirming, just as Evo openly suggested, that the 599's tire are soft as hell.

 

Excuses. Funny how the track is always clear and perfect when a GTR runs, even when being ran independently.

Every heard of a controlled slide. By definition the rear is gone - no longer in grip - but is being controlled.

Would your book be "LFA - why it's not retardedly expensive. A minority report."

If it can't even win a poll against yesterday's mid-price supercars, clearly something is wrong with the price.

If I add 1000lbs of downforce to a Scuderia and use MPSC slicks and take out the carpet and air-con and fit a rock-sold suspension then it will be as fast, but utterly stupid as a road car. Apples and oranges. You can't even fairly compare a ZR1 and ACR for the same reasons. I don't remember drawing up a manifesto on what comprises a car's worth, I just said that the LFA was hugely over-priced because cars half the price are better than it in every technical, functional and aesthetic respect bar none.

But they must be Gibbo, why else would they need to cheat all the time like you say they do?

I'm sure they don't stick to the speed limits. I really don't know how a 599 got into a conversation about a Scuderia. Do you know, Mr. Strawman?

Yes, just look at all the other articles to back up your assertions, i.e. none. It's not like the GT3.2 tested in CAR on the 'ring wasn't on MPSCs - see photo p70&71.

 

And cars priced above it are no different, in fact it's either the same or much worse.

1.) Pagani, LP640/670, SLR, Saleen, Koenigsegg, Gumpert, FXX, etc. don't have as much tech as your benchmark GT-R and 458 has. No direct injection, no DSG, electronic differentials, etc. until you get into the $1.2m Bugatti. In fact only a handful on that list have a track tested and refined chassis.

2.) None of those cars have the allocated budget that Toyota had for the development of the car.

3.) I have an idea on what your manifesto would look like. You want a car that drives for you and has enough tech to give you the best lap times. I sir will tell you that it's not always about raw numbers, but yet you still continue to pull out your magazines because "numbers don't lie."

4.) Get a life. Get out more. Find a job. Buy your damn GT-R. Shut up.

 

Can anyone perhaps realize what really happend with the LFA? No one brings out their halo car to perform worse than its cheaper competition. No automakers spend millions of development dollars to develop a halo car that for some reason costs more and delivers less than cars that are priced much less and cars with a better badge. Can we at least think for a second that the LFA's eternity like 10 year development period conspired against it? Can we face the fact that 10 years is an incredible time when developing a supercar?

Lexus and their relentless pursuit for perfection landed them on a target that would have been impressive 3 years ago, and maybe this car would have been a natural competitor for the SLR back then. But today when you have cars like the LP670 and 458 Italia the supercar game has moved past their target.

Who cares about their bloated budget or one in a million rotary loom, I personally would not want to spend $375k and spend all the time justifying to myself that I bought a car that was not worth that kind of money based on its badge, performance, heritage, ride , or handling. Let alone always being on the defensive to justify why this car is better than cars like the cars listed in the poll.

Quality, and build quality are important to me when buying a luxury car....so as I see it percieved reliability and rarity are the only reasons to buy an LFA. And those qualites in and of theirselves are not enough IMO to put up with the rest of things that you give up. And I am strictly saying buying an LFA to actually enjoy it and not as an investment.

 

Kudo's to the author of this statement. I couldn't agree more.

 

Again if Toyota's world leading and innovative approach to building a supercar equated to a real and tangible driving improvement or to a car that flat out is the standard of the class than it would stand on its own irrelevant or irrespective of its brand or badge. Again is $375k that insignificant of an amount of money that you can't expect to have it all? Should $375k only make you a participant in a very expensive engineering study and a partial owner in spirit of a rotary loom?

The only tangible improvements I can see would be its build quality in relationship to its competition. But realistically in this rarified air its just an incremental improvement over the competition. I doubt those buying a Spyker, Koenigsegg , or Pagani would consider the LFA any more rare than any of those cars. And then it comes down to the actual looks of the car, it does not scream big money like an Enzo, Carrera GT , or SLR even. I mean I aspire to own a supercar based on the partial irrationability of the decision.

Acura had the supercar for the thinking man nailed, and they had the car priced right , it looked amazing, it was incredibly reliable, and performed comparable to its competition. But still in the end its badge prevented it from being the success they had hoped it would be. Personally I think a Panamera Turbo for the wife and an MP4 or 458 for me would be a great use for $375k!

 

That is because they closed down the track, you effing moron. And the GT-R run in Car was hampered by road works. It wasn't completely clear.
Do you seriously think the track was "perfect" for Drivers Republic's test?

And the LFA can do that, so what's the problem??

The problem is that you claimed both Evo and Autocar said something, which they did not. They claimed the exact opposite: the LFA's rear end is easy to control. And like you said, if both Evo and Autocar say something, then it must be true right? What they're saying is that you don't know WTF you're talking about. We can add R&T's comment as well:
"Even with the yaw control completely deactivated, the Lexus behaves predictably with mild understeer."

LOL, a poll on 6speedonline determines what a car is worth??
How about another poll: How many here can actually afford to buy the LFA and can prove it?

Since when was being utterly stupid as a road car count in your comparison? All you considered was price/performance. Adding 1000 lbs of downforce and MPSC's to a Scuderia makes it even more expensive to merely go just as fast as an ACR. Where's the value there? It's still ****!
How much carpeting is there in a Scuderia? You can have air-con in the ACR too. Do you seriously think a Scuderia is richer in amenities and ride quality than a ZR1 by the tune of nearly $200k?

Wrong. Learn to make relative comparisons before you reply like a jackass. Just because a Scuderia might be 0.x sec slower than an LP560-4 on Racetrack Y doesn't make it slow.
But hey, you already admitted to them being paranoid, so just shut it.

So not sticking to speed limits = setting an F1-qualifying pace that would heat the tires so bad that they chunk after immediately jumping onto a dyno w/o the common-sense pre-dyno checks. Jeez, that's as dumb as anything out of mC's playbook.
A 599 is in this discussion because
1) It's been cited as a more natural competitor to the LFA (both being front-engined GT's and much more limited in numbers and more expensive than mid-engined V8 Ferraris) and
2) the LFA has, on first drive impressions, been assessed as the more agile, more involving drive (and apparently better built), and
3) Ferrari's weight claim for the 599 can be questioned just as it is with other Ferraris, and
4) just like the other Ferrari's in Evo's tests, the 599 was accompanied by a crew because apparently Ferraris need this kind of attention or maintenance that other cars don't seem to. In C&D's test, Ferrari supplied not just one, but 2 different cars.
Seriously, this isn't a rhetorical question: who TF else sends multiple cars, a small crew, even an F1 test driver who helped develop the car for testing?

And how the hell does a 599 represent a good supercar value? Ferrari asks that you cough up an additional $1,776 for prancing pony fender stickers. This on a $320,000 car!? The frame/body are aluminum (not CF made in-house), its engine isn't bespoke, it's made in greater quantities than the LFA, it's no faster than the LFA, it's not more involving to drive than the LFA. Hell, it's slower on just about any track than the Scuderia, which costs less. By your logic, 599 = pointless waste of aluminum. The ZR1 is faster, for 1/3rd the price.

So what if the 997.2 GT3 had MPSC's? Isn't that what they come with? If the GT3's MPSC's chunked just like the Ferrari's tires, you might have a point. But they didn't; therefore, you don't.

 

Apparently you don't realize that but in the hands of an experienced drag racer, the 599 GTB is as fast or faster in a straight line than the ZR1. Its also much faster than 3.7 seconds to 60, the 599 GTB's performance isn't to be taken lightly!