Some additional quotes from the same Magazine....
Speaking of weight, the ton of it up front means that you need to be patient with the car on turn-in - not Mustang patient, mind you, but the bow needs to be planted if you want to make your line and not understeer wide of it. If you go into a turn well set up but just a little too hot, however, VDIM helps. Its transitions between traction and stability control are invisible and its Sport mode does a superb job of allowing some slip angle while keeping you out of the gravel. On the track, VDIM is less satisfying in Normal mode, even though interventions are subtle, too. In Everything Off mode (also know as Holy Crap! mode), well, it's like driving on ice - a wide neutral phase soon becomes a large amount of oversteer. Even with everything off, the LSD does still help out a bit, providing some braking to a slipping wheel, and the coolest thing about this limited slip is that it can feed in brake and throttle at the same time.
The fact that this car is so capable, so fast, and so unflappable is a testament to the seriousness with which it was developed. It was shot like an arrow into one of the most competitive segments in autodom, and it can hang there. No, its chassis wasn't completely reengineered like an M car or even the new C63, but because the IS shares its architecture with the larger, V8-bearing GS, it gets away with it. Feelwise, the IS-F splits the difference between the bipolar M3 and the other parenthesis of the category, the C63, which is the very model of supersedan stoicism. It strikes its own elegant balance of the aggressive and the balletic, the stout and the playful. This car is better than it has any right to be when you consider it's within spitting distance, dynamically, of the race-bred giants in its segment. Moreover, this Lexus has the attention of all the Evo and STI drivers who, up until this car, have had no true Japanese supersedan into which to graduate. Add in that its price will undercut the M3 at an estimated $59,000, and you have a car that adheres to another precept of the Toyota way: "Be Late, But Be Great."
Speaking of weight, the ton of it up front means that you need to be patient with the car on turn-in - not Mustang patient, mind you, but the bow needs to be planted if you want to make your line and not understeer wide of it. If you go into a turn well set up but just a little too hot, however, VDIM helps. Its transitions between traction and stability control are invisible and its Sport mode does a superb job of allowing some slip angle while keeping you out of the gravel. On the track, VDIM is less satisfying in Normal mode, even though interventions are subtle, too. In Everything Off mode (also know as Holy Crap! mode), well, it's like driving on ice - a wide neutral phase soon becomes a large amount of oversteer. Even with everything off, the LSD does still help out a bit, providing some braking to a slipping wheel, and the coolest thing about this limited slip is that it can feed in brake and throttle at the same time.
The fact that this car is so capable, so fast, and so unflappable is a testament to the seriousness with which it was developed. It was shot like an arrow into one of the most competitive segments in autodom, and it can hang there. No, its chassis wasn't completely reengineered like an M car or even the new C63, but because the IS shares its architecture with the larger, V8-bearing GS, it gets away with it. Feelwise, the IS-F splits the difference between the bipolar M3 and the other parenthesis of the category, the C63, which is the very model of supersedan stoicism. It strikes its own elegant balance of the aggressive and the balletic, the stout and the playful. This car is better than it has any right to be when you consider it's within spitting distance, dynamically, of the race-bred giants in its segment. Moreover, this Lexus has the attention of all the Evo and STI drivers who, up until this car, have had no true Japanese supersedan into which to graduate. Add in that its price will undercut the M3 at an estimated $59,000, and you have a car that adheres to another precept of the Toyota way: "Be Late, But Be Great."
