We at Autos.ca never come between Jacob and his sour keys…I have been known to eat an entire Costco tub of sour key lollies over the course of a single day. So when I tell you that I am prone to excesses, I mean that I if I was a rock star I’d have died in a powder-shower so intense it was a hotel-room blizzard.
And when I tell you that after just two days I decided to never turn the traction control of the Lexus RC F off ever again, I mean that I had drunk my fill. I was done. Full. Stuffed. I had worked it out of my system.
Either that or I had suddenly become aware of the massive tire bill that would await me should I continue on my path.
It’s not that the RC F is some sort of wildly powerful monster – well, not in a way that’s not controllable at least. It’s not even that the RC F has tail-happy rear-wheel-drive dynamics that make oversteer a constant, cheerful companion. Nor is it the bizarrely short gearing/final drive ratio (one of the two) that makes the back wheel spin with just a gentle feed of throttle while you hold it on the brake. (Seriously, don’t try to preload revs while waiting to launch – it just lights up the tail). It’s not the engine note either. You have to rev the thing to its 7,500 rpm redline before you even hear it in the tomb-like cabin, but once it infiltrates, the sound is intoxicating.
It’s more than the sum of those parts.
Some of it is the way the instrument cluster changes colour and style from boring to “oh wow!” when you turn the drive select knob from Normal to Sport and then to Sport +.
Some of it’s in the way you then select “Track” on the Torque Vectoring Differential setting.
A lot of it is the way the RC F calls you an “expert” when you do both those things and then hit the Traction Control button – instantly removing all driver stability aids and traction nannies. That was one of my favourite things. No long press required; if you’re in Sport+ and already fooling about with the TVD (a device Lexus says is a first on a front-engine RWD car), then a single press of the Traction Control button turns everything off. Woohoo!
It starts long before then, though. It starts at the vivid cop-bait orange paint and the angry looking grille. It starts at the functional air intakes, carbon-fibre roof and carbon-fibre automatically deployed rear spoiler – all of which are options in the $7,400 performance package.
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