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For the third straight year in a row Lexus will compete at the Nurburgring 24 Hour race, once again using one of its LFA supercars. And much like the past two years, the team will be operated by Gazoo Racing, which fields Lexus race cars in Japan's Super GT series.
There's no word from Lexus yet on what class the LFA will run in but judging from the pictures it seems like a more track-focused model than the past pre-production models. Lexus also isn't messing around when it comes to racing talent, fielding a team of six Japanese and German drivers with some very impressive resumes. Included among them are six-time Super Taikyu Endurance Series champion Takayuki Kinoshita, 2002 JGTC GT500 winner Akira Iida and 2008 Nürburgring 24 Hour second place finisher Jochen Krumbach.
This year's Nürburgring 24 Hour races takes place from May 13 to 16th and we'll be sure to keep an eye on Lexus' efforts.
News of this new Nürburgring racer comes just a day after rumors of a Lexus LFA Nürburgring Edition surfaced.
The Lexus crazy folks over at The Lexus Enthusiast have uncovered a Japanese story about a possible Nürburgring Edition of the new LFA supercar, adding credibility to earlier reports that a more track-focused model is on the way. The extra high performance model is reportedly named after the world famous race track/public road where the LFA underwent extensive testing and which is used as a benchmark to rate all high-performance vehicles.
Upgrades to the LFA Nürburgring Edition are to include a front splitter, a large rear spoiler (fixed), a stiffer suspension, lighter weight wheels, stickier tires and a slight bump of 10-hp. This would bring the LFA's total engine output to 562-hp from its 4.8-liter V10.
The model will be offered in just four colors: black, matte black, the orange color seen above and white.
Lexus has yet to confirm details of a Nürburgring Edition LFA, but we're excited about the possibility, although we're a bit surprised the carbon chassis creation is being eclipsed so quickly.
After announcing the IS350C F-Sport Special Edition earlier this week, Lexus has now provided us with the first photos of the sporty drop-top. Priced from $57,500, it will be offered in only Tungsten Pearl (above) or Obsidian. Unique to the Special Edition is a set package of F-Sport goodies including: new 19-inch forged wheels with Michelin Pilot Sport tires, upgraded front and rear brakes, lowering springs, Bilstein shocks, sway bars, a new F-Sport grille, as well as F-Sport floor mats, an F-Sport shift knob and F-Sport badging.
The package also features black leather seats with blue stitching, while standard features include heated and ventilated front seats with wood trim, Bi-Xenon HID headlamps with Adaptive Front lighting, Lexus Navigation, a rear back-up camera, Voice Command casual-language voice recognition system and Lexus Enform with Safety Connect.
Just 100 F-Sport Special Edition models will be offered, with sales beginning later this month. The car will officially debut at the New York Auto Show on March 31st and we'll be sure to bring you plenty of live photos then.
Aside from bemoaning how the Lexus IS morphed from unique, sporty, inline six-powered styling innovator that begat Altezza taillights and chronograph-style instrumentation into an elegant and still sporty but larger and heavier, less creatively-styled and more mass market-appealing sedan, a number of you seriously miss the option of an update on the rarer-than-a-Bentley IS300 SportCross hatchback-cum-wagon. A brief write-up from the United Kingdom's Autocar magazine, however, informs us that "Lexus is likely to introduce an estate variant on the next generation of its Lexus IS...while the original model did offer an estate variant, called SportCross, the current car - introduced in 2005 - has never been available in a wagon. Lexus insiders now admit that this policy has hurt sales of the car in Europe, where it must face the 3-series Touring and A4 Avant." That didn't stop a creative Dutch artist by the name of Theo from imagining what one would look like, though, and his design is featured at the top of our story.
This author is not particularly surprised by this rumor, since, back in ... [Read More]
Much ink, dead trees, computer keyboard strokes, megabytes and screen images have been devoted to chronicling Toyota's first full year loss in six or seven decades (depending on what article you read), which occurred in the March 2008-March 2009 fiscal year. Less has been said about another factor exacerbating the situation: the strengthening Japanese yen versus the slumping U.S. dollar. Analysts estimate the resurgent yen has sliced hundreds of millions of dollars in operating profit from Japanese auto makers' books.
To be fair, a number of articles have addressed the adverse impact of a strong yen on Japanese carmakers' bottom line, and notable among these is a subscriber-only Automotive News article by Hans Greimel titled Strong yen pulls more auto production to U.S. In a nutshell, after trading between 100 and 135 yen to one U.S. dollar for nearly a decade, the dollar has weakened to around 90 yen. A weak yen aids Japanese exports, while a strong one hurts exports. More specifically, a strong yen — and weak dollar — hurts Japanese automakers in several ways. It pressures them to raise prices on vehicles exported from Japan, making those vehicles less competitive; it makes Japanese wages and parts relatively more expensive... [Read More]
A number of 2nd-generation Lexus IS fans in the U.S. may bemoan its lack of special editions such as the 2003 and 2004 IS 300 SportDesign and Japan's current IS 250 X-Edition, while others may complain that the F-Sport and Version F trim packages available in Europe, Japan and Canada haven't made their way to the States. Fortunately, Lexus has now addressed these complaints with the 2010 IS 350C F-Sport Special Edition of the carmaker's newest retractable-hardtop convertible. Inspired by the Obsidian (black) IS 350C pre-production prototype equipped with the full suite of F-Sport accessories that we sampled at the IS C Press Preview in Newport Beach, California, the IS 350C F-Sport Special Edition nevertheless features a couple of distinctive aesthetic touches of its own, namely a special F-Sport grille (presumably replacing the standard vertical upper grille bars with a zigzag mesh pattern reminiscent of the IS F and the F-Sport package IS sedans available in other markets, as shown at the bottom right of this article) and unique 19-inch forged alloy wheels with the 10-spoke snowflake pattern first seen at the 2009 SEMA Show on the Vibrance Orange Glow Kandy IS 350C F-Sport by TRD (shown at the top of this story). Unfortunately, that burnt orange color is not available on the IS 350C F-Sport Special Edition. In quasi-Henry Ford fashion, you can have any exterior color as long as it's Obsidian (black) or Tungsten Pearl (silver). ... [Read More]
As has become our custom here at my.IS, we bring you the latest updates and information from Consumer Reports' twice-yearly (April Auto Issue and November New Car Preview) issues devoted solely to automotive consumer and reliability information.
The Compact Sports Sedans Vehicle Ratings and Vehicle Profile are a replay of what we reported back in November 2009, as are the Safety Ratings from April 2009.
Among their Reliable Used Cars, Consumer Reports recommends the 2001 Lexus IS300 in the $6,000-$8,000 price range, the 2002 Lexus IS300 in the $8,000-$10,000 price range, the 2003 Lexus IS300 in the $10,000-$12,000 price range, the 2004 Lexus IS300 in the $12,000-$14,000 price range, the 2005 Lexus IS300 in the $14,000-$16,000 price range, the 2006 through 2008 Lexus IS250/350 in the $24,000-$30,000 price range, and the 2009 Lexus IS250/350 in the $30,000 and up price range.
In stark contrast to the mostly status quo reported above, the CR Reliability Ratings for the Lexus IS have seen the most profound changes in memory. We fully expected to see the 2003 model year fall off the chart, but were quite surprised to see that, after years of Insufficient Data for the... [Read More]
Fresh off having his Lexus IS 300 being awarded the First Place 1st-gen Lexus IS trophy at FL2k10, the Florida Lexus/Supra Winter Mega Meet on Sunday 31 January 2010 (full disclosure: this author was one of the three judges that reached that decision), Ray Ramírez (better known to our community by his baadhabit screen name) saw yet another much-deserved reward to all the passion, hard work and love that he has thrown into his Crystal White ride: a feature story in the April 2010 issue of Import Tuner magazine. We, of course, would've awarded him the cover, but Ray himself informs us that tuner magazines tend to shy away from featuring white or black cars on their covers.
In the Vanguard, the well-written and informative story by RC Faderoga with photography by Henry Z. DeKuyper, informs us that Ray's passion developed gradually, with influences as disparate as his high school friends' Toyota Corollas and Datsun 510s, PlayStation's Gran Turismo game and the first Fast and the Furious movie. With his older brother modifying his Toyota Supra, Ray soon realized that one-upping him with a Mitsubishi Galant was an exercise in futility, so he saw... [Read More]
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Aside from bemoaning how the Lexus IS morphed from unique, sporty, inline six-powered styling innovator that begat Altezza taillights and chronograph-style instrumentation into an elegant and still sporty but larger and heavier, less creatively-styled and more mass market-appealing sedan, a number of you seriously miss the option of an update on the 
Much ink, dead trees, computer keyboard strokes, megabytes and screen images have been devoted to chronicling Toyota's first full year loss in six or seven decades (depending on what article you read), which occurred in the March 2008-March 2009 fiscal year. Less has been said about another factor exacerbating the situation: the strengthening Japanese yen versus the slumping U.S. dollar. Analysts estimate the resurgent yen has sliced hundreds of millions of dollars in operating profit from Japanese auto makers' books. 
A number of 2nd-generation Lexus IS fans in the U.S. may bemoan its lack of special editions such as the 
Fresh off having his Lexus IS 300 being awarded the First Place 1st-gen Lexus IS trophy at 
