Lexus RC F review

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Lexus's line of V8 hotrods ends with a fiery-sounding feast of carbonfibre

The Lexus F-brand performance car as we’ve come to know it – that superbly left-field, one-fingered salute to German performance car hegemony – might now finally be a spent force. With both the IS F and GS F super-saloons fading in the memory, the subject of this road test – the Lexus RC F Ultimate Edition – is a V8-engined full stop of a sort.

For the past 20 years, these cars have been like some wonderfully strange experiment for Toyota’s global luxury brand. Out to forge an alternative path towards an enthusiastic audience, they’ve been entirely undiverted by horsepower races with Munich, Stuttgart or Ingolstadt. They’ve proven, instead, that Lexus knows perfectly well how to build noisy, ebullient, exciting cars: boldly, with commitment – and entirely on its own terms.

What comes next for the Fuji Speedway performance entity, then? There is talk of a son-of-LFA hybrid supercar, and possibly electric models too – but since those won’t be anything like the V8s we’ve come to know, we could hardly let the RC F disappear without a full set of road test performance figures, and one last noisy blast down Horiba MIRA’s mile straights.

 

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DESIGN & STYLING

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Lexus RCF Ultimate 2024 grille badge 4

The RC F has certainly had a good innings. It was unveiled back in 2014 – when a ‘63’ on a Mercedes still stood for a proper six-and-a-bit-litre AMG V8 engine, and plenty of other V8 options lurked in the wider performance firmament.

A significant facelift came in 2019, when the chassis was reinforced and lightened, the Track Edition version was added, and the headline attraction – that famously idiosyncratic, atmospheric 5.0-litre V8 – had to give up a few horsepower to meet European emissions rules.

19in BBS forged wheels look a bit small on the car but have plenty of visual motorsport cachet. Lexus should have lavished better rubber than a Michelin Pilot Sport 4S.
Matt Saunders
Road test editor

The Track Edition – with its lightweight 19in forged wheels, carbonfibre roof and bonnet, titanium exhaust and carbon-ceramic brakes – forms the basis of this Europe-only Ultimate Edition. It is, in essence, a Track Edition car with a pop-up carbonfibre spoiler in place of the usual fixed rear wing. It gets a numbered plaque (only 30 examples have been imported to Europe) and some new, F-branded projector puddle lights. (The Titanium Carbide grey special paint pictured here is a £250 option.)

The car uses the uprated active torque-vectoring electronic differential that Lexus added in 2019, the shortened final drive ratio for the eight-speed torque-converter gearbox, and the launch control system also appended at that point.

In spite of the weight-saving measures, though, our test car was still 1733kg in running order (55% of which inauspiciously carried over the front axle) – plenty for a top-order performance coupe, with 457bhp and only 384lb ft to move it.

 

INTERIOR

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Lexus RCF Ultimate 2024 dash 37

The RC F’s 2+2 cabin is quite a rarefied and esoteric place, with its plush and unusual luxury materials. The bright blue leather highlights on the two-tone sports seats (comfortable and easy to berth) are complemented by attractive blue Alcantara on the steering wheel rim. But even more effective is the blue weave that can be seen in the gloss carbonfibre cabin trim on the consoles and fascia. It’s a captivating touch, and strikes just the right note for a car that needs luxuriousness in its ambience, but a performance sense of occasion too.

The car’s fundamental ergonomic layout isn’t so well judged. The seat cushion is mounted 3-4in higher than would be ideal for a suitably low, sporty-feeling driving position; and head room is concurrently a little short, especially for taller drivers wearing helmets.

You sit higher than we'd prefer, but you do so comfortably and with decent support from the seats
Illya Verpraet
Road Tester

Space in the second row is limited for adult passengers, but this is more typical of coupes of this size. Boot space is likewise class-typical – although the carbonfibre rear bulkhead precludes folding seatbacks.

The digital instruments change through many layouts, along with the selected drive mode. Some are clearer than others, but none is unappealing – or even remotely ordinary – to look at. 

Elsewhere, indicators of the RC’s age are in generous supply. It retains Lexus’s old Remote Touch Interface multimedia touchpad controller, and the functionality and navigability it confers are about as clumsy as you are likely to find in any current production car. There’s also a CD player at the foot of the centre stack, for those who have kept their ’90s music collection.

 

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

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Lexus RCF Ultimate 2024 engine 33

The RC F’s 5.0-litre naturally aspirated V8 engine sounds every bit as enticing as its mechanical specification reads (forged conrods, lightweight balancing measures, 7300rpm cut-out). Lexus does a superb job of keeping it from vibrating the car much, even at full load and heroic crank speeds, while at once also letting it flood the cabin with its combustive musicality. There can be few engines of its kind that are as lovely to listen to at work.

And you do have time to admire all that orchestral drama as the RC F hauls through each gear. For good or ill, this car isn’t particularly quick by the standards of its modern peers. It has an especially unspectacular-feeling electronic launch control system that keeps wheelslip under very tight rein indeed. Nevertheless, on a chilly but dry day at the proving ground, it produced very consistent, if a little pedestrian-feeling, standing-start times of 4.7sec to 60mph and 10.5sec to 100mph (BMW M4 CSL: 3.6sec, 7.3sec; Mercedes-AMG C63 S E Performance: 3.3sec, 7.6sec).

In 2024, this is clearly a car for enthusiasts who care less about outright pace than style of delivery. Once the engine is out of the doldrums of its rev range beyond 3500rpm, its gathering forcefulness still feels abundant for road driving, as well as subjectively beguiling.

The carbon-ceramic brakes are strong, and the pedal quite well tuned, but the gearbox is a real letdown. Lexus promises “full torque-converter lock-up” from second to eighth gear, but it certainly doesn’t feel like you get that. In manual mode the ’box seems to slip in and out of normal engagement below 3000rpm (although actual drive isn’t interrupted), only giving you confidence that it’s fully in train in each gear at high revs.

This feels like a gearbox chosen for a driver who will just select D, sit back and seldom let the engine work beyond 4000rpm anyway, which is a lamentable shame.

Braking endurance

RIDE & HANDLING

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Lexus RCF Ultimate 2024 front corner 44

There are some real dynamic highlights to the driving experience of the RC F Ultimate Edition. In line with what we have already reported of its performance, they are mostly notes of slightly subjective fine detail. And judged in wider focus, we must record that this car feels its size and weight on both road and track; it doesn’t corner as flat or grip as hard as an equivalent BMW M car or Mercedes-AMG; and it doesn’t have the sweetness of cornering balance and adjustability of posture of rivals, either. But, nevertheless, it finds a way to involve and entertain its driver, and leaves its mark on your memory.

The expanse of the bonnet seems to fill the lane in front of you quite widely. The RC F doesn’t have an especially fast steering ratio (2.9 turns lock to lock), and so it doesn’t have the flat, instant turn-in you might expect. But, perhaps consequently, the car takes a line harmoniously as it gently dips a shoulder into every successive bend. It sticks to it assuredly. And, as you accelerate away from the apex and begin to unwind the steering, you can certainly feel the rear axle loading up and moving around slightly, shuffling power to the outside wheel – and helping to keep the car’s nose true to your intended path. 

Perhaps also because it’s so moderately geared, the steering is a highlight: communicative and intuitive, well weighted and tactile. There is, in short, a level of engagement here beyond a lot of fast road cars, and a readiness to absorb that’s all the rarer for its subtlety.

Track notes

The RC F Ultimate Edition’s active rear diff comes with Track and Slalom modes, the latter giving it that extra dose of turn-in agility. 

It’s only a fleeting dose, because there’s no escaping the influence of the car’s V8 on its slightly noseheavy chassis balance. It takes quite a lot of provocation to coax the car into more than a whiff of momentary oversteer, for example, though the Expert mode stability control will certainly allow you to experiment.

This isn’t a blunt-handling car. It carries plenty of speed, has decent steady-state balance and entertains to a point on track. It doesn’t seem at home right on the limit of grip, however, as a BMW M4 or Porsche 718 Cayman so plainly can.

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MPG & RUNNING COSTS

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Lexus RCF Ultimate 2024 front tracking 42

Lexus officially withdrew the RC F from sale back in April 2024, along with the larger LC coupe. It hasn’t been explicit about how many of the 30 Ultimate Edition cars have been supplied to our shores, and no doubt offered direct to selected customers – but it’s likely to have been sufficiently few that to see one will be a rare occurrence, and to find one for sale rarer still.

The V8 uses the thermally efficient Atkinson cycle to achieve lean-running European emissions compliance, which also allowed it to top 30mpg in our touring economy test (just), delivering a very respectable brim-to-brim motorway range of up to 437 miles.

VERDICT

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Lexus RCF Ultimate 2024 front static 1

Ten years after it succeeded the Lexus IS F as its creator's core performance model, the RC F is leaving the scene in even more esoteric fashion than it appeared.

The Ultimate Edition may lack the uncompromising track focus and pin-sharp handling appeal of a Porsche Rennsport or BMW Clubsport special. It is, honestly, little more than a numbered plaque. But it is also a car whose particular take on luxury performance, backed by a singular, virtuoso V8, makes such comparisons moot. 

It’s the parting shot of a car – or perhaps a whole line of cars – that just didn’t conform, and was all the more likeable for it.

Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders Autocar
Title: Road test editor

As Autocar’s chief car tester and reviewer, it’s Matt’s job to ensure the quality, objectivity, relevance and rigour of the entirety of Autocar’s reviews output, as well contributing a great many detailed road tests, group tests and drive reviews himself.

Matt has been an Autocar staffer since the autumn of 2003, and has been lucky enough to work alongside some of the magazine’s best-known writers and contributors over that time. He served as staff writer, features editor, assistant editor and digital editor, before joining the road test desk in 2011.

Since then he’s driven, measured, lap-timed, figured, and reported on cars as varied as the Bugatti Veyron, Rolls-Royce Phantom, Tesla Roadster, Ariel Hipercar, Tata Nano, McLaren Senna, Renault Twizy and Toyota Mirai. Among his wider personal highlights of the job have been covering Sebastien Loeb’s record-breaking run at Pikes Peak in 2013; doing 190mph on derestricted German autobahn in a Brabus Rocket; and driving McLaren’s legendary ‘XP5’ F1 prototype. His own car is a trusty Mazda CX-5.