Lexus LC500 adventure
Luxurious and techy, Lexus doesn’t build cars for carving corners. Does it? On the curves of California’s Highway 33, the LC500 begs to dier
California’s inest roads in Japan’s 911
IT’S EARLY. REALLY early. Runners pound Redondo beach’s surf-flecked boardwalks against a spectacular pre-dawn sky. We’re set for another perfect day, obviously – this is California – but the sun’s yet to rise. Last night’s gloom lingers in the deep steel and glass canyons of Downtown Los Angeles.
When you’ve just flown in from London, early is easy – jetlag flings your eyes open at 4am. So you jump out of bed, take the elevator to basement parking and slide into the best-looking car in the place, a Lexus LC500, red like a candied apple. Regrettably, there isn’t another soul around to enjoy the 5.0-litre V8 as it flares into life, a rude, very un-Japanese exhaust racket reverberating around this stark space of violently bright strip lights and cool concrete.
Purring forward on a fraction of the car’s potential, we roll up the corkscrewing exit ramp and make for the freeway on streets that’ll soon be choked with traffic. We’re just hundreds of yards into a day-long drive but already I’m happy; that caramel noise, the low-hipped driving position, sports seats so good you want to order copies for watching TV at home. (They’re bespoke to the LC and standard on £80,595 Sport and £85,895 Sport+ versions.)
We’re heading north on Interstate 405 toward Oxnard and Ventura County, the only other traffic surfers chasing a pre-work ride. The 405’s fleeting post-apocalyptic emptiness has less than an hour to live. In the Lexus, the nav system is still without a destination, the head-up display still needs adjusting for my height and there’s a conspicuous lack of music – blame a lack of immediate chemistry between me and the car’s infotainment. We’re old friends, Lexus’s point-andclick trackpad interface and I, but the magic’s taking its time to return. In one fumble I accidentally hit Destination Assist and find myself connected to a call centre concierge – I’d hang up if only I knew how.
But if you must cruise tedious multi-lane freeway without company or Spotify, this is the car to do it in. Neat, beautifully finished and possessed of an understated sophistication that coolly goes without gauche carbon finishes or gaudy body-coloured strips, the LC’s fine interior also enjoys swaddling its occupants (there are rear seats, but only to the same extent that a Porsche 911 also has rear seats) in a most agreeable blanket of refinement.
In Comfort mode the car rides beautifully, its magnetorheological dampers languidly draining all the discord from the scarred concrete over which we’re flying. No doubt formidably heavy soundproofing also ensures the roar of the car’s big Pilot Super Sports (245/40 21s up front, 275/35 21s at the back – standard wheel sizes are 20 inches) is but a murmur by the time it reaches me. And the cockpit itself – oblique interface aside – delights with the rightness of its fundamentals and its air of crafted solidity. I look on with child-like delight as an idle prod of a button sends the large central rev counter (bound by a bevelled ring to send wristwatch perverts gooey) smoothly sliding to one side, its syrupy choreography revealing a comprehensive multi-function display beneath. What’s more, the mechanism’s oiled perfection insists that this car’s tenth owner, prodding this same button 30 years hence, will smile the same smile as mine.
Just as the LC’s detailing shimmers with countless engineering hours, so the chassis feels ultra-rigid, the structure entirely unmoved even as the wheels and dampers fight freeway worn and lumpen like an old mattress. Later, when I get the chance to put some load into the car, that same reassuring sense of solidity will persist, lending credence to Lexus’s assertion that this is its stiffest bodyshell yet, one crafted to resist twist with lessons learned developing the LFA. Direct influences from the ultra-exotic flagship include the LC’s strategic use of ultra-high-tensile-strength steels in a mixed-media structure that also employs aluminium (bonnet, front wings, door skins) and sheet-moulded carbonfibre.
Lexus insists this rigidity is critical to the linear responses, predictable behaviour and easy confidence the LC team prioritised, but if a heavily reinforced and largely steel body sounds heavy then you may not be surprised to learn that the lithe-looking LC weighs two tonnes, give or take.
All that mass does at least sit in the right place. The new LS saloon sits low but the LC, on the same GA-L platform, is4
subterranean, giving a pliant ride for a given amount of roll. Hip points are also dropped close to the car’s centre of gravity and the wheels are pushed to its corners, for happy designers and happy engineers. The V8 is also tucked well behind the line of the front axle, for a front/mid layout. This also makes possible the LC’s low bonnet.
The trick engineering goes on. A carbon roof on Sport and Sport+ cars, to further drop that centre of gravity. Aluminium-intensive suspension componentry, for reduced unsprung mass. Hugely bolstered camber stiffness, for linear responses under duress on rough roads. A battery exiled to the boot in the name of idealised weight distribution. Lexus, you’re forced to surmise, doesn’t do things by half.
Less than 90 minutes since we left LA and I’ve had enough of the Interstate’s stupor. The Lexus has breezed it, if occasionally feeling lethargic on roll-on: blame a ten-speed auto, intergalactic ratios and a relatively torque-light engine. In the milder drive modes you’re forced to shove your Converse to the firewall to elicit a meaningful response. Essentially, it’s the LC telling you to stop being so damn idle.
Highway 33 sees us turn inland and climb, first to cute and glamorous Ojai, whose manicured sidewalks ooze disposable income, and then on – tactical Starbucks installed in the cupholder – via a left turn to the Maricopa highway. I notice with a smile that the only other vehicles still with us are packs of motorcycles: always a good sign.
After the 24/7 urban claustrophobia of LA, this empty corner of California promises strong medicine: miles and hours of winding nothingness up mountains, through glades of winter-bare trees and across open plains of windblown grass. Birds wheel overhead. Lines of long-fallen fencing run at the roadside. Corrugated iron, leprous with rust, flecks orange onto an otherwise earthy palette of greens and ochres. Drive on and you’ll reach Maricopa and, past that, Bakersfield: spiritual home of California’s hot-rodding scene thanks to its Air Force bases and, post-war, a rich supply of bored young men with a thirst for speed. But faster routes to Bakersfield are myriad, making the 33 officially the least travelled highway in Ventura County. Lie in the road and exposure is the primary threat, so sparse is the traffic.
Half asleep from the restless night and the early start, the LC and I ease ourselves in, getting to know each other on three-dimensional curves that curl whimsically across this land. Tentative inputs and cautious corner speeds are met with encouragingly keen responses, the car’s agile nose going exactly where I want it to – this despite the words ‘variable ratio’ and ‘steering’ playing on my mind. (Top-spec Sport+ LCs marry a variable-ratio rack with rear-wheel steering.) Finally, too, there’s the opportunity to work the engine; to get busy with the paddles and plunder the hitherto unexplored upper reaches of the rev range.
When three C63 AMGs come hammering past in the opposite direction, clearly having been out since before dawn and now with their hearts and stomachs set on a late breakfast back in LA, I twist through to Sport+. The LC relishes the increased effort, like it never really liked being called a GT anyway. The grip, the fast-swelling confidence, the poise – they’re all intact as I get greedier on the pedals.4