RC F Contending in Motor Trend’s Best Driver’s Car Comp

By adpock - October 1, 2015

2015-Lexus-RC-F

It’s never too early for a good best-of-the-year award, especially when it’s Motor Trend’s 2015 Best Driver’s Car.

Part of the fun is the buildup to the esteemed prize, as you’ll see in the video below, which features all-star driver Randy Pobst putting the heat into hot lap in a 2015 Lexus RC F. And what better place to test the Best Driver’s Car than at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca?

The beginning of the video does a really good job of explaining how the RC F was designed by mashing up the front end of the widebody GS, the mid-section from the last IS convertible, and the butt of the current IS sedan. Motor Trend tells us this to explain why the car weighs so much. And though they seem suitably impressed by the “useful,” “hot-rodded” V8, MT has concerns that the weight (4040 lbs.) and torque numbers (389 lb-ft @4800 rpm) won’t show as well as some of the RC F’s first round competitors like the Cadillac CTS-V, the Mazda MX-5 Miata Club, and the Mercedes-AMG C63 S.

The majority of the vid though is all about Pobst’s in-car impressions. And unfortunately, as far as MT‘s 2015 BDC goes, Pobst’s impressions go a long way:

“The handling still needs to go to finishing school. It’s a difficult car to drive fast because its characteristics are different in every corner. It’s not predictable. I don’t know whether I’m going to get oversteer when I arrive down there or understeer. The shift program is also not right. Something is not right. I wasn’t shifting it manually, and maybe I should have, but I got the impression doing a warm-up in it that we’d be OK. But it just kept doing weird things in the shift program that slowed it down.”

Perhaps the press car needed to be re-calibrated. Or maybe it just needs to get to know Randy a little better, and vice versa. Oh well, it could have been worse. The Corvette C7 Z06 didn’t even finish.

You can read about the other 2015 BDC competitors and see them in action here. And there’s plenty of discussion going on in the forum about this as well.