Where is the hate? Lexus is the flagship luxury brand of the TMC. Lexus had started out by transforming Lexus into a 'not so boring' brand back with the ISF and then continued with the LFA creating the F brand to lower the average age. It accomplished what it set out to do since so many young buyers purchased Lexus F products since then helping Lexus shed the image of a 'grandpa mobile' that was plaguing it till late-2000s. People want Lexus to continue to build on this brand that had so much invested into it in the last nearly 20 years. Saying, it should not be a Toyota GR product, but rather continue building the legacy of F as an F product, has no hateful connotations in it whatsoever. It is a subjective opinion of people that the F product should continue to be the flagship high performance brand.
I personally don't really care. GR or F product, the LFR is definitely something that needs to continue the legacy of the RCF GT3 as its direct replacement.
What about this? Arguably, the most successful racing campaign TMC has been able to mount, is the Lexus F product, which is the RCF GT3 that replaced the LFA racing car back in 2016 - 2017. Just looking at the wins against the level of competition makes it clear, which car has the highest profile wins. Most importantly, the foundations are strongly rooted in the street car as per the homologation requirements of the GT3 racing.
The only reason why RCF was in production for 10 years, was homologation requirements of a street car needed to compete in the GT3 class.
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You seem to have bias against the F brand. RCF GT3 was not a joke. It raced for 10 years and won all kinds of races in one of the toughest GT3 class. It was purely logical as RCF GT3 is being retired exactly to replace it with the LFR GT3 to be its successor. RCF GT3 just was retired this year after almost 10 years. It is even on the front page of the Gazoo racing:
In 2014, the LEXUS RC F was released as a high-performance coupe. At the same time the RC F was being developed, an R&D project to build an RC-F GT3 car was begun.
toyotagazooracing.com
Yeah, and what did the Gazoo LFA accomplish? I recommend you go and look at the win. It is easy to say it 'won its class' when it was competing in the SP8 class where there was practically ZERO competitors. LFA was practically racing itself in the SP8 class at the Nurburgring. The only time I recall there was another car competing in the SP8 class, was a modified Nissan GTR that broke down after a few laps and LFA won against it. Overall, the LFA never placed better than 12th and mostly around 20 - 25th overall through out its career. Lexus even tried coming up with a more potent version of the LFA called LFA Code X, which had the 5.3 Liter V10 (stroked version of the 4.8 Liter V10) in order to compete in the more competitive SP3 class. TMC again failed to get good wins with the LFA Code X and the LFA Code X was short lived.
By all accounts, the Gazoo LFA was a failure in terms of getting big wins. TMC only raced the LFA a few seasons and then scrapped it in favor of the RCF GT3 in 2016 - 2017. The RCF GT3 over the next 10 years won a lot of races in far tougher endurance series despite having a much smaller R&D budget and being an inferior platform on paper than the Gazoo LFA.
