Everything You Need To Know About The Toyota/Lexus Sports Cars
Lexus might have pulled off the most brilliant automotive public relations move of the year, and it didn’t need to deploy a single person to do it. The Japanese automaker dropped off its new Sport Concept at The Quail; no new information, no PR people to answer questions from journalists, just a car sitting on a stand all by its lonesome. How is that a good move, you may ask? It made everyone talk about it. Is this the LFA successor? Why does it look different from the spy shots? What engine is under the hood? Is that a drone built into the roof? Why aren’t there more details?
People love a good mystery, and the stories surrounding this car may already be numerous enough to fill an Agatha Christie novel. The internet is awash with theories and rumors. Not only has Lexus been flaunting this concept car, but its parent brand, Toyota, recently showed off an awfully similar car called the GT Concept at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Does this mean we could soon have two flagship Japanese sports cars running on a shared platform? There is still so much we don’t know about these cars, as both brands have been incredibly vague about the projects. In eager anticipation of an official announcement, we’ll talk about what we know so far, what is still a mystery, and what we’d like to see from a future Toyota and Lexus flagship sports car.
Lexus Sport Concept/Electrified Sport Concept/LFR
The world has been begging Lexus to build another supercar since the V10-powered LFA went out of production in 2013. The LC 500 is a lovely Grand Tourer with a fantastic V8 engine, but a turbocharged LC F model never materialized, and it probably wouldn’t have lived up to the LFA’s legacy anyway.
Rumors of a successor were swirling around for years, but they started picking up steam in 2021 when Toyota and Lexus showed off a room full of 16 electrified concept vehicles that included an unnamed, slow-slung sports car. Lexus said the car would have solid-state batteries enabling a 435-mile range and a 0-60 mph sprint in the low two-second range.
That concept was eventually given a name, the Lexus Electrified Sport, and it was brought around to various car shows as a preview of future design language and battery technology. Lexus didn’t share any new details about the car other than this short blurb on its media site:
Lexus has imagined a next-generation battery EV (BEV) sports vehicle concept that inherits the driving taste of the performance cultivated via the development of the LFA concept vehicle.
Nothing else was made official, but Lexus did file trademarks for the name “LFR” in 2022, which sounds like a fitting moniker for an LFA successor. Fast-forward to present-day, and Lexus has come up with yet another new name and an updated look for this car. Now called the Lexus Sport Concept, dropping the “Electrified” portion of the name, this version debuted some fresh styling that we hadn’t seen before.
The hood sits higher, the headlights are more intricate, and there are clearly some entry and exit points for air at the front, hinting at the presence of a gasoline engine. There are LFA-style scoops above the rear wheels, a drone built into the roof, and although the press photos didn’t show them, there appear to be two exhaust ports hidden under the pop-up spoiler. So wait, is this car electric, or not?
Toyota Gazoo Racing GT GT3
The Toyota side of this story begins slightly later, in 2022, when the company debuted the GR GT3 Concept at the Tokyo Auto Salon. It teased some incredible aerodynamics, a possible replacement for the RC F GT3 race car, and that’s about it. Toyota never shared more concrete details about that concept, but later that year, the same car was randomly spotted wearing a Lexus badge.
We told you this tale has lots of twists and turns. This was the first (and not the last) indication that there may be some internal struggle about whether to call this car a Toyota or a Lexus.
From what we can tell based on recent in-the-metal appearances, there are three versions of this platform: a Toyota race car, a Toyota street car, and a Lexus street car. That creates an interesting dilemma because, although Toyota competes in racing series such as NASCAR, Formula Drift, WRC, and others, it does not currently have a GT3 car.
We know the RC F is going away – it’s been given a Final Edition send off – meaning Lexus will no longer have a race car to compete with in the GT3 IMSA class. That would spell the end of Lexus’ 20-year participation in motorsport, something we can’t imagine Toyota’s chairman, Akio Toyoda, would allow. Perhaps that racing version will be permitted to race under multiple brands.
What’s Under The Hood?
It’s anyone’s guess how Toyota and Lexus plan to sell and market this car around the world. Perhaps it will be a Honda/Acura NSX situation where the United States gets it as a Lexus, and the rest of the world receives a Toyota. One thing is certain, though: it will not have a V10 engine like the LFA. That’s the bad news, but there’s some good news too: both versions will likely get a 4.0-liter twin-turbocharged V8 that produces way more power than the LFA.
We’re guessing the racing version will be capped on power, meaning the road car may actually have it outclassed. Perhaps the street car will have hybrid assist, while the race car ditches it to save weight. Rumors suggest the hybrid version will deliver upwards of 700 horsepower. Either way, this new V8 engine sounded incredible when we heard it testing.
As for the Lexus, there is still a chance we will see an all-electric version alongside or instead of a hybrid. The Sport Concept at The Quail had what appeared to be exhaust ports, but those could very well be speakers meant to fool us. Why else would the spoiler close down on them? Lexus has confirmed it is working on an EV with a simulated manual transmission and augmented sounds that could even mimic the LFA’s V10, which could be great fun in a car that looks like the Sport Concept.
We’ve seen that high-end companies like Pagani learned the hard way that customers don’t want electric supercars, but if Lexus can find a way to inject the fun of a manual with the sound of an LFA, it could change peoples’ minds. Hopefully, the next time we see one of these sports cars from Toyota or Lexus, it won’t have the word “concept” attached to it.