Yahoo Autos 'LFA: The Roar of an Angel' Tells How the Lexus LFA Came to Be
Toyota built but 500 examples of the Lexus LFA, its super-est supercar and sometime race car, a front mid-engine, rear-drive, V-10-powered wonder of the world. Launched in 2010. with its limited production run concluded in 2012, the LFA was a cost-no-object halo machine that changes hands today at prices close to $1 million (more than double its launch price).
And yet, Toyota lost plenty of yen on every single one. An unprecedented business model for the Japanese giant, the LFA project was sold with a major assist from unabashed gearhead (and future Toyota president) Akio Toyoda, as the company sought to launch the Lexus brand at home, two decades after the marque's introduction in other world markets. Twelve years after going out of production, the LFA remains, without question, the unlikeliest thing (excepting perhaps the 2000GT of the 1960s) the mass-market juggernaut has ever offered for sale.
Fittingly enough, then, the story of the LFA's development, told by chief engineer Tanahashi Haruhiko, presents as one of the most unusual model histories we've ever read. The book was underwritten by an ardent LFA fan who agreed for it to be only lightly edited. Haruhiko was anxious to tell his and the LFA's long-and-winding-road story in exacting detail and, being retired, was free to do so. In recounting the singular model's history, he was prepared not just to introduce readers to all the people in Toyota's world at the time, but to step on toes as needed. And while he does go on, he also gives unfettered insight into the process of developing a car—especially one as rarefied as this—and the chancy business of navigating Toyota's powerful entrenched bureaucracy. There's surely more than any potted history the company might itself promote.
In one telling passage, Haruhiko recalls the advice he received from Yamaha, which developed and supplied the LFA's 552-hp, V-10 engine. As the engineer expected, Yamaha was "highly critical, saying there was no way we could produce an impressive sports car by going about things in the standard Toyota corporate consensus-based way of working. Yamaha's advice: 'Ignore those who don't understand.'
"This is not the Toyota mindset," the author deadpans, "but I have worked that way ever since." The copious notes he'd kept from the beginning—the LFA was 12 years in the making—have helped him let it all hang out, for better and worse.
For no detail is too minute in the engineer's telling, so lesser notes and small asides do on occasion obscure more important ones. But most important is that it's all in here, and much of it is fascinating and worthwhile. It reads in many instances like a diary, with much telling insight into his life, career, and opinion. For instance, he has an obsession with Italian car design and designers; he charged ex-Ferrari man Leonardo Fioravanti with the LFA's design development, and it is he who was responsible for the unusual rear placement of the radiator. But, if nothing else, readers will be made acutely aware of the very long road from idea—it started in 1998 as a much more humble experimental project between Toyota and its then-new subsidiary Daihatsu— to showroom reality, with innumerable stops, hiccups, meltdowns, and rethinks along the way.
For example, when the project officially launched in 2000, the V-10 powerplant choice remained a major topic of debate with development by Yamaha not starting until November 2001. (Toyota's intention of entering Formula 1 with a V-10 engine factored strongly in the decision to develop such an engine and undoubtedly helped the car's chances of reaching production.)
The first, aluminum-bodied prototype was delivered in June 2003. But by August a new proposal had been issued, and an earlier decision to explore ditching the aluminum body in favor of carbon-fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) was revisited, with first tests of this prototype coming in October 2004.
In 2005, the LFA was shown at the Detroit auto show, and the switch to CFRP became official. But that same year, in June, a fuel fire destroyed a prototype at the Nürburgring. In July, a prototype's exhaust heat shield caught fire, and all testing was halted, including at the Nürburgring, where Mr. Toyoda, a serious shoe, would be back in 2009 much to the horror of Toyota executives, running the LFA in competition under an assumed name.
That same year, Toyoda-san, rapidly rising within the company named after his grandfather, momentously declared to Haruhiko: "Let's recognize [LFA] as an official project of the company. We must become a company that can also produce this kind of car, not just a company that makes money." Without Toyoda, Haruhiko writes, "the LFA would never have been introduced to the world."
Reading more like an obsessive's carefully recorded, fact-laden diary than a standard history, but with much of the emotional baggage along with scads of never-before-seen photos, notes, and drawings, LFA: The Roar of an Angel stands as the definitive telling of Toyota's ass-kicking oddball's remarkable story.
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