W216 Lexus RC F Gr.4

The RC F Gr.4 is what you get when you throw good parts onto a bad car.

It has phenomenal brakes. It's arbitrarily blessed with a 7 speed gearbox in the same category where Corvettes and NSXes have only 6 speeds. The suspension soaks up bumps and kerbs to the point where they almost aren't felt. The tyres on this car actually feel properly aligned; a rarity in this game. They'll bite on trail braking and corner entry, and the inside tyres aren't the first to give up mid turn. Plus, slides in this car can even be easily corrected with just a flick of counter steer. Hell, I even recall at one point in the game's life when the powers that be blessed the RC F with OP straight line speed. Unfortunately, all that is thrown at a fat, ugly car with a half assed prototype interior and a lopsided 54:46 weight distribution, largely owed to having a hulking 5.0L V8 up front.

The end result is as mixed a bag as they come. Due to the Gr.4 RC F being based on the 2016 RC F GT3 prototype, it not only shares the awkward interior still featuring an out of place clock, but it also inherits the prototype's even more awkward 2nd to 3rd gear shift, which makes the car feel like it choked on its own engine oil. With the gears that close and an engine that peaky, you'll be making that shift many times across several tracks. But, just like the RC F GT3, the RC F Gr.4 is a very neutral, stable, and predictable drive otherwise, one that earns and begets a reckless amount of trust from its driver, and shouldn't require too much time to get to know. The front end bites in wonderfully on corner entry, so much so that the rear end starts hinting at a slide in the tighter turns, helpfully rotating the car as a whole into a corner, and the car even puts down power really well for an FR. But, on the flipside, it does struggle a little with high speed sweepers owing to the heavy front end, and you'll have to make the front tyres scream slave labour to squeeze that cornering prowess out of them. I like my RC F Gr.4 with -1 front brake bias for that extra biting edge into a corner, but I suspect for longer races, that will have to get knocked back a bit to even out the tyre wear front to rear.

I'm tempted to say that the RC F Gr.4 is a good all rounder, a jack of all trades that you can default to if you had to pick a manufacturer for a season for which you're unsure of what lies ahead. The reason I can't say that is that, despite the GT3 cars fitting the bill and the Gr.4 car handling well, the latter is just SAH-LOOOOOOW in practice; I recall Vic of all people driving his RC F Gr.4 being harassed by my Cayman GT4 around Nürburgring GP during Week 205 when we tested the 86 Gr.4. The RC F just couldn't compare to the mid engine menace in the corners, and it's not like it pulled away at all in the straights, partially due to the slipstream it was providing the Cayman. That doesn't sound like much of a knock against the RC F in writing, until you realise that the Cayman is one of, if not the slowest car in Gr.4 with BoP applied in a hot lap scenario; it has much less power and weighs so much more than the RC F with BoP applied. It's essentially a 5 speed toy going up against a 7 speed Kaijuu. That such a thing can more than harass the RC F around a track then, is as atrocious as saying a paintball gun has the same stopping power as an AR-15. Why is the RC F so slow? HOW can it be this slow with those numbers and that good a driving feel?

To be more thorough in my test, I ran the Cayman against my peers mostly running RC Fs this week, and I overtook them all within two laps of Willow Springs before setting the fastest lap of the race. I might have thrown the entire race away, but don't let that distract you from HOW FREAKING SLOW the RC Fs were. It's almost like the "F" in RC F stands for "failure".

It made for some tremendous one–make races, but the RC F is proof that, to make a good race car, it's better to start with a good base that requires minimal work than to throw expensive parts at a bad base.