It’s A Match Made In Drifting Heaven: A $350,000 Lexus LFA With A NASCAR TRD V8


It’s A Match Made In Drifting Heaven: A $350,000 Lexus LFA With A NASCAR TRD V8

The Lexus LFA is a strange beast of a car, because it’s both a technological demonstration and a completely unnecessary supercar that didn’t sell well. Anybody who has ever heard the 4.8L V10 scream to it’s redline knows that this car is something truly psychotic…it revs so fast that the tachometer had to be digitized to accurately reflect how fast the car’s engine goes from “idle” to “Oh, sweet mother…!!” Practically every auto journalist who got to drive one got out of the car salivating for more, and I’ll speak from personal experience: hearing one rip through the gears in the tunnel next to the Las Vegas Convention Center was heaven for my ears.

As the story goes for this particular LFA, however, things were nowhere near as cheerful. According to the story (which is unconfirmed, by the way), this car was damaged during the Tōhoku tsunami in 2011, and sometime between then and now, the car was repurposed as a drift machine for OTG Motorsports. The punchy V10 and paddle-shifted six-speed manual was gutted in favor of a TRD-sourced NASCAR V8. Purists may cringe, and there’s always the anti-Japanese, anti-drifting crowd to contend with, but this LFA showcases both restoration and hot-rodding perfectly to me. A flooded car, supercar or not, normally means that it’s time to fire up the crusher, but instead this Lexus was treated to a second lease on life, where it will get to fry tires and scream it’s lungs out through that well-tuned exhaust system. Sounds like a good story to me. Now, will someone please send the race team a real camcorder, iPhone, something so that we can get a video that is bearable to watch?!


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One thought on “It’s A Match Made In Drifting Heaven: A $350,000 Lexus LFA With A NASCAR TRD V8

  1. Nick D.

    The LFA by all accounts was kind of a half-baked car, excellent motor and styling (To some) but a chassis that wasn’t really all there.

    I believe this is the most expensive drift car competing at this point.

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