F in Ireland

have to admit the Lexus IS-F was one of those cars I was especially eager to slip behind the wheel of on Irish soil. In Issue 67 I'd proclaimed it to be a real BMW M3 rival but any time you go out on a limb there's always that nagging doubt that there was something in the water that day or perhaps the cars we drove at the launch in Spain were just a little bit too good, if you catch my drift. So it's always nice to get one's hands on an Irish model and give it the berries over some pock-marked Irish blacktop to make sure I'm not leading potential buyers down a hundred grand dead end. Thankfully, Lexus even decided to launch the car at Mondello Park so I would also be able to reassure myself that the IS-F was as good a track car as I'd remembered. Hell, the instructor might even let me turn off the VDIM so I can really see just how good it is without the high-tech electronic safety nets.On first re-acquaintance I'm glad to see that the IS-F is every bit as good looking as I recalled, low and mean and full of attitude but with very little superfluous embellishment, which makes it a surprisingly purposeful and serious looking performance car. Irish models come with the larger 19-inch alloys as standard and, in fact, there's only one option offered on the IS-F in Ireland: a sunroof. Everything else, from the heated leather seats to the satellite navigation, is standard equipment, which makes it reasonably good value, if you can describe a €107,500 car in such a way.On the track, the IS-F once again felt superb; proper fast, as you'd expect, but also manageable and friendly with no unexpected handling characteristics nagging you every time you approach a corner. In short, it felt just as good around Mondello as it did around the Monteblanco circuit in Spain, confirming that I wasn't imagining things when I drove it first. It's difficult to pinpoint what I enjoyed most about the IS-F – the soundtrack; the powerful and fade-free brakes; the slick transmission or the positive, talkative steering – but when you combine all these individual traits you end up with a car of remarkable ability and communicativeness that simply makes other cars feel leaden and numb in comparison.Later in the day, I get to chance to take the IS-F onto the country roads around Mondello and once again, it leaves me gob-smacked. Despite having no active ride and non-programmable throttle, steering or engine settings, the IS-F was a delight to drive, zipping about with the kind of eagerness you'd expect from a hot hatch but with enough suppleness in the system to shrug off bad Irish surfaces and ugly potholes. This means it’s not only a better day-to-day car it's also a better driver's car, because you can take it over just about any windy road you can think of without worrying about it getting thrown off course by a mid-corner bump. Performance cars really don't come much more exploitable than the IS-F.Back on the track, with the VDIM completely off, the IS-F proved no less impressive – composed, predictable and alert. The system's intervention is generally subtle and there's no question that it does a brilliant job of keeping the IS-F in check, but without the electronic safety systems you notice just how balanced, talkative and exploitable the IS-F really is. Lexus says that the driving instructors are two seconds a lap faster with VDIM than without but I think if the IS-F had a limited slip differential it would be just as fast in the hands of a professional driver simply because he or she could feed the power in earlier and slide the car around more aggressively instead of spinning away those potentially satisfying drifts in a cloud of smoke. Sure, it won't matter to most drivers most of the time but surely offering an LSD as an option at the very least would make sense.Having been back behind the wheel of the IS-F I'm now happy that my earlier declarations about its dynamic capabilities were accurate and I didn't get carried away in all the PR hype surrounding the car. It is a brilliant car and despite its open differential I'm still hugely impressed with how satisfying it is to drive. A return trip to the track is in order, except this time with a couple of its closest rivals. Can Lexus' first-ever proper performance car really be better than the best supersaloons Germany has to offer?