The racing car accelerates flat and hard with a typical V10 howl; harsher, more mechanical and somehow less mellifluous than a V12, but spine-tingling all the same. The effect is amplified by the racer’s stripped-out interior and race exhaust, but if the Lexus engineers can keep any of that sound for the road version, then its owners are in for a true aural treat.

The rate at which knots are piled on under full throttle is unsurprising, given the car’s all-up weight of just 1500kgs and a power output of ‘something over 500bhp’, which is all that Lexus will currently admit to. No performance figures or official outputs have been revealed, but when we had a look under the bonnet somebody had scrawled ‘#557 P’ with a marker pen on one of the cylinder head covers. Could this have been the record of an engine dyno test?