Best Value Performance Cars
Gallery 1
Numbers can be cruel. Especially so to Lexus, it seems. For the second year running Toyota’s premium arm occupies the bottom rung on the $50-100K ladder yet, just as with last year’s IS350 F Sport, in this case the numbers don’t paint a fair picture of the RC350’s abilities.
Put simply, as the only car in its class without some form of forced induction, Lexus’s new two-door isn’t particularly fast, and at $74,000 it’s not particularly cheap, either – not a promising recipe for BFYB success.
Its pace isn’t helped by the fact that at some point in its development process the RC350 was clearly given free rein with the buffet; its 1680kg kerb weight is just 50kg shy of the twin-turbo, all-wheel drive Nissan GT-R.
As a result, Lexus’s latest coupe scrapped with Renault Sport’s Megane Trophy R for the straight-line wooden spoon, but whereas the Trophy R then set a blistering time around the track, the best the RC350 could manage was a 1:42.9. Not bad, but certainly nothing to write home about.
The 3.5-litre atmo V6 might not be a powerhouse with 233kW/378Nm, but it howls like an old-school touring car and with eight gears to play with, it’s not too much of a task to keep it revving in its 4000rm+ happy zone.
Likewise, the RC350 might’ve gone too hard on the donuts during development, but there’s little sense of its mass on track. There is heaps of grip – its minimum corner speed in Winton’s famous sweeper was a competitive 108.01km/h – and the variable ratio steering means most corners are dispatched with little more than a quarter-turn of lock.
The only real chink in its armour is the lack of a limited-slip diff. Why manufacturers persist in building powerful rear-drive performance cars without LSDs is beyond us, as more often than not having one fitted transforms the on-limit behaviour of the car.
Its behaviour at 10/10ths can be frustratingly inconsistent and it was marked down by the judges accordingly. Please put a diff in the RC350 Lexus, it’ll make it faster and more fun – it’d be cruel not to.
FOOTNOTE: As part of its MY16 update Lexus has now made a limited-slip differential standard on Lexus RC350 F Sport – hooray!
Specs
0-100km/h – 6.08sec (7th) 0-400m – 14.12sec @ 164.34km/h (7th) Lap time – 1min42.90sec (7th)
Overall Scoring
Bang Index – 52.4 Price – $74,000 Bucks Index – 89.8 BFYB Index – 104.7
Judges’ Rankings
Campbell 7th – “On track it tries hard and is surprisingly agile. But ultimately prefers cruising to attacking.”
Morley 6th – “A sporty Lexus that finally is. Still a road-car first, though”
Newman 5th – “Impressive, and fun, but lacks that final tenth and needs an LSD”
Spinks 7th – “Great electric steering and old-school V6, but imagine if RC were 100kg lighter”
Luffy 5th – “What a fantastic car. The chassis balance and amount of front-end grip on turn-in is unbelievable; it really rotates well in the corner. One of its biggest let-downs is the lack of a limited-slip diff. It also does everything right, but it needs more power to unleash its true potential.”
