Review | 2015 Lexus RC F | The License Killer

This is the

2015

Lexus RCF. It's amazing what a little power can add to a car that we've tested in almost every Lexus we can get our hands on. This is the RC F, the pinnacle of Lexus engineering. In fact, this is the highest performing Luxus model you can get besides the LFA, except the LFA is no longer on sale, so if you want full-throttle luxury, this is it. We have seen it with many cars where they make it shine. bold and aggressive and it's all show and no show, including several Lexus, they do the same thing with this car, this front grill finally makes sense because on the left side of the car you have an oil cooler in the vent, on the right side you have a transmission .

Cooler, the front air dam is wide open to cool this engine and then you get real ventilation in the hood because these five liters just generate a lot of heat. Everything about this front end, from the aerodynamics to the airflow, is designed to make this car essentially go faster off the line. At first glance, you may not be able to tell this car from the RC 350 coupe when you get close to it. There are definitely some things here that they have done especially for cooling. You've got this vent that runs along the front fenders that just helps move the air.

At the bottom of the car and around the side panels, you go to the rear and you have these rear bumpers like gaiters that help direct the airflow along the side and smooth it out along the back of the bumper, including these little fins on the taillights. They've spent a lot of time with aerodynamics here moving air around the car gently to aid high speed stability. The RC F features this active rear spoiler that is actually integrated into the rear trunk and will go up and down automatically if you're in auto mode. 4,550 miles per hour you can now control it yourself, of course, which, for efficiency reasons, you'll probably want to leave it down, according to Lexus engineers, it helps stabilize airflow, creates a bit of downforce at the rear , especially at higher speeds, how much downforce is that information?

I couldn't find when you start to get into sports car territory, you sacrifice a lot of livability. I just bought an MX-5 and as much as I love driving that car, when it came time to put my gear in it, oh my god, what a Nightmare, this car. Everything fits here. My drone case. My camera mounting case. My laptop bag. The mounting bag. you have this kind of car, you understand why it is a little bigger. I don't really care about the weight because of this because you can use it like a real car, we can ramble about aesthetics all day and the truth is everyone is going to have a different opinion on how they think this car looks or how it looks in general , but let's give it a spin, let's take it to the shop and see if form follows function here, of course, we are below the RC F, which is

lexus

lexus

is Lexile, excludes most luxury sports cars or high-end sports cars if you really want to call it that in its line since the LFA is gone and some of that is shown here on the front, we have the front diffuser arrow panel off whatever. you want to call it to expose the innards, the interesting thing about removing this arrow panel here is its actual implementation of the coolers at the beginning, when you look at the front of the car, you see your son's radiator and you have two air exchangers for me.

At first I thought it was multiple radiators, but it turns out the right side of the car is the transmission cooler. The left side of the car is actually the oil cooler lines that run from the oil filler shaft assembly up and toward the left front bumper. the oil cooler and lines are very short and well managed, there really isn't much length here to take risks but again this car has been designed to cool this engine pretty well, hey let's release a lot of heat that's for sure , man. It's got to be one of the best cars I've ever seen, yeah, oh yeah, well, when you popped the hood the other day and I got behind one of the wheels, I mean, it's not even with the car opener. hood, man.

I thought I had parked this thing and I was standing next to it, look Nana thinking, yeah, so holy man, it's like being in the sauna, right, it's crazy, yeah, so they designed this here to dissipate the heat. They've handled the heat extremely well and just getting over the snot out of this car I didn't see what do you know? No I didn't, I mean I drove in Eco mode the whole time, oh actually he was going to go into fuel economy, that's exactly what I did. I went to Starbucks Panera Caribou. Coffee Target and then the Starbucks inside the target and then you didn't take the subway at Walmart too, yeah, oh, it's a Walmart for this, you know, my whole thing was just running errands on this and I was trying to get more than 30 miles. per gallon didn't work, although I ended up with 16.

I got 26. Wow, let's say 25. I think 26, who knows how real that is, but seeing 25 after a hundred miles or so, it's crazy, how much power does this thing have? . shutting down, I mean, and it's got balls, this is, you know, it's a fun car to drive, it's got balls, that's for sure, so we've addressed the cooling, they've done a really good job here. I didn't see the oil temperature increase. I didn't see the coolant temperatures not going up and that was really and we've been in hot weather and driving pretty hard clearly, yeah, and you don't really notice a difference in power delivery.

I mean it got cold one night and I turn off the A/C and you can tell there's a little bit of juice, but this car doesn't seem to absorb that much heat, the performance is consistent when you have so much power on that you notice a five horsepower difference. Yes, I mean. It's a big difference on a Mazda 2, yes we have brake cooling ducts that the actual inlets are right next to the heat exchangers on the front bumpers and you have brake cooling ducts that go from there and are actually the reason for the entries. here and clearly at a speed when you're in track conditions of over 100 miles per hour.

I'm sure these are moving a lot of air in there now, of course we don't have real ducts behind the brake rotors, but this seems like it will be a legitimate effort, a real effort to cool the brakes. I'm almost surprised they didn't tilt the backing plate a little to collect some of that air. Yeah, I mean, the backing plate could also serve there for heat dissipation, you know. I mean well this is a good time to get into this, we have Brembo 6 piston monobloc brakes on the front and angry monoblocs and Brembos on the rear, these brakes are crazy, how big are the rotors?

It's fourteen point nine in the front and rear or you know 13-something or 12-something, it doesn't matter that size anyway, but we have almost 15-inch rotors in the front, all the subframe support is aluminum, all the control arms, bushing and upper control arms. they're all forged aluminum here this is when you look at these control arms this isn't here this is pretty huge they're huge this is the real deal now the only thing I really like about the front of this car and I'm complaining about it is no it's the grille, I'm sure it's not the grille on the suspension, we have non-adjustable shocks, non-adjustable double wishbone shocks and the good thing about that is that compared to some of the other cars, including Lexus, in this range of prices, you want to change your shock absorbers that you like if you really want to put real shock absorbers and you like the TT EXO leans or something like that, you don't have to worry about the electronics, you don't have to worry about the three modes, yes from Lecter, you just change the shock absorbers and you're there. actually that's really nice and makes it a lot easier to work on too and the rides are pretty good, they don't hit you, no they don't, it's good to point that out, although this is a good setup for switching to range shocks high these Sachs shocks that are here are very well valved, they have it extremely tuned for street performance.

I'm pretty impressed with the fact that overall they are Korean Sachs shocks, which I thought were a bit funny, but regardless of where they are made, if they are valved extremely well, the car has EPS and this feedback is pretty good. Depending on your driving modes, the steering feedback changes a bit there, but it's not as synthetic as some. carnival, you'll barely notice it, yes it's good, I've noticed it more on the accelerator pedal than anything else, the way it adjusts your performance modes between your normal Sport Plus sport, you feel it more on the accelerator and the way in which the transmissions are scheduled. than what you do with the physical steering or you know the EPS module is really good for the electronic power steering module in a car of this weight and type.

This is still like Scott was saying this is a luxury car first of all, it's actually almost like a GT car, so As we go back, this is pretty much covered and we're not going to remove this panel because honestly, we don't. you will see the transmission pan correctly. This is another eight speed torque converted high performance gearbox that they took from the ISF and they have completely reprogrammed it for this car, so the performance I got from driving the ISF when it first came out was on a limited basis due to a lot of time sitting in it, but this feels magnificently better when you drive it, probably one. one of the fastest shifting trends I've ever been on except for dual clutch stuff, dual clutch aside this is awesome what you can call the Train yeah and the benefit yeah there's a lot of people that will complain and will complain about not doing it. having a dual clutch in performance cars, even in a single clutch unit or a manual transmission, let's get past that point.

I'd rather have a manual transmission than all that crap, but since we're stuck with this, we've said This happens with the other Lexus cars, when you go into normal mode, it shifts like a luxury car, there's no hesitation, no gears like slop, There's no, you know, you know, rattle or rev with it, it's buttery smooth, that's what you get from the torque converted units. So we have this crazy looking transmission in the back, what is it? It's always like a fucking front-wheel drive transmission part from a shitty car. Let me rephrase that, no, it looks like a complete top drive unit. here and that's partly because it's a torque vectoring differential, so you have your center differential and then you have these electronic modules on each side where the computer can control, as you can see when you drive it based on g. -The force is not only the G force, but the steering angle affects the way this car is going to distribute the power to each wheel and the result is that you always have a lot of traction as if there was never a point you were at Stepping on the gas in this thing and you don't feel the rear ends engaging, the wheels may come off a little, but that's due to the power not coming from the right, nothing more.

I don't know if I would spend the money on this option though because it is a lot and you get a standard Torsen unit if you don't get the right TBD, but when you spend that much money anyway what are you going to spend? Yes, that's true, but if you want, don't spend 75 grand and charge. this goes up or even 80 if you go for the carbon rubbish, if you spent if you want with the base and went with a Torsen you can't go wrong here, you could even make it livelier honestly the rear end and then just maybe you can do a Burnout , you might be able to go, shouldn't we say that first we have to pedal in FBI clearance mode, yes, although you are going to do your rowing ballet to remove everything, but this would also mean ditching the TVD and when entering the Torsen , you would lose weight here, you would lose the electronic complication of all this and probably the maintenance in the future.

God knows how much it would cost you to replace all of this as we get to the rear suspension here. We also have some cool parts, we have more forged aluminum components, you know, we have multiple Tyrel sway bars with rotating buckles, yeah, and that's a really cool thing and we touched on this when we were doing the FRS stuff when you lower a car. or change the suspension geometry you need to adjust the end links because you almost don't want to preload the bar so this allows you flexibility with this style of adjustable turnbuckle and links on the sway bar it allows you some adjustability there and even If you wanted to put some real preload on the bar to catch up, yeah, and you could make the rear end do a little bit more than you want, the second thing we noticed is this trailing arm that's here now if you go back to our RC 350 video can be seen in the RC 350, it has LDH in the F Sport model, which is the direction in thefour wheels from Lexus, so these real trailing arms connect to an electric motor.

I helped turn the rear wheels slightly. I mean, we're talking. Based loosely on conditions, this car looks like it has the same system because it's wearing these rubber boots, which makes it look like it has some kind of motor that moves its toes in and out. I don't have a definitive definition. respond to this, but there is no motor attached to these, this does not have four wheel steering. Now I assume this is used to help move the rear end closer or further away under load, which is causing the wheel angle to change. under load and I think that's why you have this type of flexible bushing with that side that has load, maybe it pushes this side, that is possible to lean the tire a little bit, it has something to do with the alignment under load and normally we see arms trailer in fixed position right here. you just have one doing this under a rubber boot like that, there's something going on there, but that being said, there's no adjustability here, front or rear, we don't have camber adjustment, we don't have wheel adjustment and that really sucks.

I think if you look at the stiffness of the front suspension, I'm sure they didn't even want to bolt it in, there are aftermarket bushing kits for the front that are hard core that are not a cheap piece of bushing kit for tuning. front and rear camber, so you have some options there, but at this price, that's the last thing you'd want to mess with unless you're going with an aftermarket suspension I guess, and then it becomes a stock car. track and all the other fun things that come with it, so what do you do? We've got some tars here, Scott, what's two seventy-five and something for 75,359 teenagers?

Yes, they'll be expensive to replace for sure, but you know we go through a lot of them, you'll go through a lot, especially if you're driving it like you're supposed to drive well, yes, exactly, but here's the thing about these: they actually have a Surprisingly good grip, they are very quiet. I had them on the track, zero problems with them, they are Michelin Pilot super sports cars, they are definitely one. one of the best street tires you can get, you know, obviously these aren't the most extreme, but it's a good balance between street and track. These wheels are pretty much the best you can get on this car.

They are hand polished at the factory. one, they are actually clean, they never make late breaks, they are on the right, they look very good, they fit very well into the overall design of this car, they did a good job with their usually factory wheels, they look pretty bad a lot of times , but yeah, these are less, you have a lot of spokes like that, yeah, I mean, these are fully forged wheels; They're not nonsense, you know, cheap, cheap, easy. In fact, I would feel bad if I replaced them. I know a lot of people change them, but 'This engine is pretty good, again in line with the other Laxus that have port and direct injection, which we've done, we beat it to death.

This is one of those things when you get into a high-end engine that's really good. have because you eliminate all the need and all the nonsense of trying to deal with carbon cleaning over the course of the life of the car, you don't have to deal with that here and even like in the case of this car, it has valve overlap advanced, you know the Atkinson cycle we joke about, that's why you can get 25 miles per gallon on the highway, you couldn't do it without that in this car, that's right, it would be more like 12 all the time, okay, so this It's again in a long line of really really strong Lexus engines, as long as you don't modify it to the max as is, yeah, enjoy it while you can because try not to be there. for a lot longer, yes this is the last of its kind, now people are saying well is this the same engine outside of the ISF and is the bottom end the actual block?

It is almost identical to the ISF, but the actual heads and cams have been reworked and there is actually much more power output in this engine. The other thing you get with this air box is this vacuum controlled flap that opens on the air intake and this is part of the Sport Plus mode, its plumbing induction noise in the cabin and this flap opens. and it shuts down when you get into the high rev range more than anything and then ramps up with your nonsense digital sound through the loud speakers in the car, it's loud and always sounds good but like you said in the last video if you start with something that sounds good and you pull the glove on the inside, it will sound good on the inside and that is definitely the case now.

If you've seen my previous mamuh rally videos, you'll know that my first time in the RC F was driving. at Road America I never drove it on the street, I just went full speed on the track the first time, so here's just a representation of that lap I had all day in the car, the most important thing I can say about leaving this car. and trying to go as fast as I could is how comfortable I felt right away, that's the most important factor here, there's no intimidation factor, yeah, it accelerates like a bat out of hell, it's the power of this car, The naturally aspirated v8 is incredible.

You want a naturally aspirated engine in a track car, you understand that when you drive a car like this again. I felt so comfortable doing things in it that I wouldn't have done in other cars, it's the strongest thing for you, even with everything. The car nannies felt completely predictable, there's a bit of understeer, but it's mostly just skills. All I can say now you'll probably hear some complaints from other

review

ers that there's too much understeer, not enough turn in. Road America is really long track and wide track longer track higher speeds suits this condition perfectly.

I would love to have this car, drive it daily and just come to the track and not have to worry about it because this thing was outperformed all day, all day, I mean, from morning to night and it didn't miss a beat. and that's really impressive when you get to this kind of car in technology and there's 10,000 miles on the clock and I know it's been punished, it feels exactly the same as before. when I first bought it with almost no miles, okay, so we have it in Sport+, we have the TVD set to slalom, we have it set to expert mode, which disables stability and traction, allows you full control of the box of changes, which is the fastest way to change. this car and it will bounce off the rev limiter so let's take a look at the corners and go into manual mode well it's against the wall there's so much power you can't use this on the street and I think I'll start.

To get into this with the Mustang g/t, you get to this point with a car like this, it's so advanced it's so capable that you can't even use a quarter of its features on normal roads, let's look at acceleration here. just huge, uh, the biggest thing about having this kind of horsepower on the street is the only way I can explain this to a normal person is when you're young, especially a young guy and you're like 1617, you get on the steering wheel of any kind of power and you're driving like a complete, it's in your DNA as you get older, something changes in your brain, you know that whole idea of ​​going out all the time and taking risks goes away because now you're a little bit responsible if you get hooked or get a speeding ticket your insurance costs more your loved ones get angry the stakes are much higher and you stop driving like an idiot after a while well, most of us do it as you get older you become more worldly then you get back into a car like this and suddenly something activates in your brain and you want to drive like you're 16 again, like a complete idiot and it's really difficult, it takes a lot of self-control to drive a car like this, Normal, I mean, three to four, five seconds and you're already in reckless driving territory and this is on any highway now at fifty miles an hour the wing automatically lifts to help with some downforce this transmission is at its best moment when we drive it at full speed and you can see the boats below.

Here it's incredibly fast when you're at high revs when you're at high G-force, hot, heavy, breaking gears at high revs, it's very quick and Sport Plus. mode and in expert mode, you have to have those two combinations for the transmission to be like this, let's take a look at these turns, we will have to go back a lot. I'm on public roads, it's just ridiculous and the worst part about the speed in this vehicle is that it doesn't feel like you're going that fast. I think that's the most dangerous part of this car is that you have no sense of speed. 80 miles per hour feels like 40.

Scott and I just got on that mex. 5 and we thought, man, you feel like you're going 100 miles an hour in that car all the time, in this car it feels like you're going 3040 and that's why it's so hard to maintain normal speed. I'll turn on the torque distribution screen here so you can see what the differential does when I accelerate it into a corner, that's great every time I hit the gas. I appreciate driving this car not just on the throttle, don't I. The only fast car is the car you appreciate driving on normal roads. It's super quiet.

It's luxurious. It has a great interior. The seats are very supportive. It does everything a tram should do. It just has that high performance advantage and that's kind of it. the confusing part you'd expect from a hardened track car, but you've got it all here. It would be a great daily driver for most people if you could afford it. I mean, it's expensive. Now we can talk about broadcasts all day. The 20 different modes it has and if you do this or that, this combination makes it change faster or slower. It's really annoying to me when you get to this level of performance, that's Lexus' Achilles heel of not having a manual transmission.

I got out of a GT 350 today on the track and the gt350r and it is never more evident how satisfying and how simple it is when you know how to drive a manual transmission correctly, nothing can replicate this, I don't care how much electronics how much programming how much engineering and time you put in here and how much it costs, you have a good manual gearbox, none of this matters and from a performance car perspective I think that's what I'm missing here, it's one of the few things that would make me not do it. I bought this car within the RCAF, well it's actually not much different to the RC350 F-Sport if you ask me, but there are some key differences and some pretty big ones.

The first thing is these seats, whether you choose the new lock material, which is. leatherette or synthetic leather are great super supportive fits good lumbar support excellent the big problem with these is probably on a longer ride they can start to feel a little uncomfortable I noticed my butt hurt a little and not for anything else, in It was actually the seats, but I have a bony butt. The next thing with these seats is that the seat coolers are catastrophic and bad, they stink when you get into any kind of heat, that's actually when you would want to use them.

They like to have a 90 degree day, they never seem to do anything but make a lot of noise now, when the sun goes down and you're driving at night, that's when they feel like they're starting to cool you down. then you don't even need them, so that's a complaint. Here are some of the other differences: The gauge cluster for the RC F has a specific gauge cluster and is even different than the RC 350 F sport, it still has a digital gauge. the center, but now it is no longer motorized, that has been solved. The nice thing about this is that when you change your different sport modes from Sport Plus normal eco, it actually changes the entire layout of the gauges and also allows you to customize the color for Sport.

Plus and Sport mode so you can have a different look, a little bit different, and in the case of Sport Plus mode, it will actually move the oil temperature gauges and the coolant gauges nicely from the center to the top left depending on the way you set it up it's really good for performance driving it tells you everything you want to know you're on the sports screen here and it also tells you things like your g forces which is kind of useless when you're driving like a lap . timer that you have to stop and start yourself and of course if you have the TVD option with torque vectoring it shows you what the difference is in the power distribution between the rear wheels that you wouldn't be paying attention to when you're driving but infotainment is here since I work in a technological field.

I'm in front of a screen or different systems 24/7, that's my life. I have to agree with turbo Suki here, the infotainment on this The car is on the top floor and what makes it even worse here is the fact that there are so many things in this interior that are 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 in the car overall its so good that dealing with this is a big disappointment its really total shit let's say you were a worker and wantedbuild your own sports car, you had exterior sketches, transmission design, suspension, all that you didn't know what to do with the interior you were looking for. something elegant, ultra-modern, luxurious, quiet, intuitive, excellent ergonomics, you turn to Lexus to design your interior.

These guys have it done really well, from the soft touch materials to the advanced or high-end materials like carbon fiber, to the feel of the steering wheel, to the driving position. This is it, this is one of the best cabins you can get in any affordable price range, at least under $85,000, that's comfort, how does it feel? How comfortable is it? How is the rear legroom? Well, this car looks a lot like the RC 350. It's a pain to sit in the back seat because when you move these seats forward, it takes forever for the motorization to move back and forth, but once you get back there, the Actual comfort is really good, especially when you get a model without a sunroof because you have plenty of headroom back there, whether you're tall or short, you'll fit pretty well in the back.

You can have a pizza party. You can have a social gathering. If you sell candles, you can even sell some candles. I like the legroom in the back seat and the space in general, but this is a two door car, don't even get me wrong, it's a pain to get back in there, this is it, we're done with this car. Scott's car says goodbye, yeah, what do you think overall? It's a pretty good car, some minor complaints, but it would be a good winter car for my Miata when I drive it in the summer, I would lease it.

Oh, definitely, gosh, you know what a really good car is, yeah. This is one of the best cars we've ever owned and obviously when you get to this price, I think it's the best one yet. It definitely is. I'd say the new MX-5 is really good in a very different way. very good, but it shares a lot of the cool factor here in terms of the general thought process given to the engineering behind it, but this is that you have the balls, you have the luxury, you have the ride quality, the handling, the good. interior you know something cheesy here and there like what you hate you know what that is oh the infotainment yeah garbage yeah I agree with you especially now that I've been in every Lexus and they all have the same problems with infotainment, but you get to this. level of this car and everything works great and you use it, okay, would you rather have the little mouse pad or would you have something like the damn Mazda has a dial?

Oh, never mind, it's not the dial, it's not the mouse pad. It's not the joystick, it's the software, everything, yes the software just needs to work. I don't think it makes sense to really have it if you need GPS alongside the standalone GPS unit, right, that's what I would do. I would just attach suction cups. about the screen there with a Garmin GPS there, I mean what can you honestly do from the infotainment? What do you really need to do there? Simply stream music. I would know, but that's all. Music is that's all I would use it for. and you could have a damn standard head unit which would be much better but this one is 835 watts and while that's another complaint ok sorry this premium sound package when your fiancé is in the car and you want some good music romantic sounds like you. heard through a fucking soda can or something, yeah, it wasn't, I think they haven't found a balance and we were talking about this when you get into higher end audio equipment or if you're an audio file, You'll know that you really need a lot of high-end amplifiers, especially with good speakers, you need to put a lot of power through them to get the clarity you're looking for.

It's understandable, but you shouldn't do it in a car. Don't do it like that. high, they're starting to sound good, so they haven't done it. I don't think they've achieved that balance between low volume quality and high volume quality. When you turn it up, it sounds really good. Yes, give me back the old Nakamichi CD players. during the day, late at night, roll cassette tape so you can get high, oh yeah, I could throw in some cassette mix, uh, and the only other complaint I have is that well, I already said it's the crank changes, it's okay if we are going to have paddles, you don't have them.

I need this backwards manual joystick nonsense or if you do it right yeah I don't know why everyone doesn't make it wrong because people are stupid. I don't understand why it is written, but the engineer behind this card is the reason why I mean it. this is true, you know you're driving the BMW, it's the right way, yeah very few cars do it the right way, I don't get it, but hey at least the paddles are there, I would never do it, I mean, If it was the right way. I don't think I would continue using it, I wouldn't use it either, how fun it is to just punch it, hey driver, yeah, well the thing is, I don't like making comparisons with other cars.

I don't like to compare this, it's like a BMW is that six sir, it's four butter, all this competition, the Mercedes. I don't care when you drive this car, you drive it like this car and what this car is, this is one of the best cars out there if you can turn off your brain and turn off the bank racing the spec sheet racing everyone does everything I can getting point zero to sixty plus in some manufactured condition is never going to matter to you well, you get behind the wheel this car I don't I care what you say, it's a really nice car, it will put a big smile on your faces the first time you drive it get that gas yeah definitely so you would have to divide pressure, temperature, pressure, pressure, temperature and pressure in case one is wrong.

Can't I have mechanical and electrical mechanisms? you can ever make din meters, so how would you place all those gaming pillars? Oh, on both sides, oh yeah, on the passenger side, that way the passenger can see all the pressures and temperatures, well, yeah, when you stick this thing into a wall in pro or expert mode. Sorry, expert mode. Your side airbags will impale you with everyone they gave you a zoo.