Dan Neil’s review of the Lexus IS-F for the Los Angeles Times is entertaining from start to finish, particularly this passage about making the IS-F sing:
The engine’s most vulgar feature, however, is the dual-inlet intake manifold, found somewhere inside the maze of engine plumbing. If you mash the gas in this car hard enough, this second inlet channel opens and the engine note transforms from a mellow Japanese wooffle to a soul-tingling, lycanthropic howl. Stay off da moorrrs, laddie!
The car also sings. The IS-F is equipped with an eight-speed automatic transmission, in which the gear ratio intervals are very evenly spaced. Eight speeds happen to correlate to eight notes of the diatonic scale — do, re, mi, etc. If you hold the throttle and speed steady, and you shift up and down with the shifter paddles, you can actually coax simple melodies out of the stacked-pipe quad exhaust, for instance, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” And, yes, I get paid for this.
It’s very clear that Reid enjoyed the IS-F a great deal, voicing only one complaint about the low-revving engine, which issues a warning should the RPMs go over 6,300 and cuts the fuel at 6,800. Of course, this isn’t such a big deal when you have eight gears to cycle through.