Since the production Lexus LFA’s introduction last year, the only concrete performance figures we’ve had to go on were the official numbers from Lexus—but that’s all changed now that Car & Driver had a chance to perform some speed tests with the supercar at the Nissan Technical Center in Arizona:
At the moment, there’s no launch control on the rear-drive LFA, so we ran a few acceleration runs by just stomping on the throttle. The LFA hit 60 mph in about 4.4 seconds, about as quickly as a stock BMW M3 and not terribly impressive. So we tried an old trick from our high-school days: the neutral slam.
The neutral slam was a way to launch automatic-transmission cars before the advent of the brake-operated shift lock (before Audi’s brush with unintended acceleration, in other words). The technique was simple: Borrow your parents’ car, go out on a quiet street, wind it up in neutral, and slam it into drive.
The computers of most modern cars prevent you from doing that, but the LFA allows it. It took a few tries to get the technique perfected, but by holding the V-10 at about 3800 rpm and selecting first, and taking care not to go wide-open throttle and melt the run in wheelspin, we got a clean, repeatable launch that dropped the 60-mph sprint time to 3.7 seconds, right on Lexus’s claim, and the quarter-mile to 11.8 seconds at 124 mph.
Given Lexus’ usual tendency to be conservative with their performance figures, it’s a minor surprise that the C&D test were dead on the official numbers—which likely means Lexus also used a similar neutral slam technique. That said, this is still a pre-production model of sorts, and there’s a good chance that the LFA will be equipped with launch control by the time it reaches its first owners.
Full credit to C&D on this report—be sure to check out the accompanying photos.
[Source: Car & Driver]
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