Shimoyama

is go and see. I'm Malcolm Glabba. In the last two episodes, we investigated the sound of the Lexus LC sports car. In this episode, we're heading to the track and in preparation we got a briefing from Yessushi Muto Mutusan, the chief engineer of the LC, in his fifties, salt and pepper hair, a little bit of an athlete's swagger. It was the day before we went to the track. We were at the main Lexus building in a conference room. Mutusan came early. The Lexus people were always early, remember

O Mutanashi, mindful hospitality. These are not people who would dream of inconveniencing their guests. Mutosan spent years working on the LC, obsessing over every detail. So I asked him if he would know whether or not he were sitting at an I'll see if he were blindfolded. He said absolutely, and of course he would. Mutosan knows how the car sounds and moves and feels, but that wasn't his point too. Yeah, it's explained to me the meaning of the of the

drawing on the whiteboard. Halfway through our briefing, Mutosan stood up and drew a simple stick figure of a seated driver on the whiteboard, both legs extended. He wanted to demonstrate how designing a car at a place like Lexus works. You don't design the car then fit the driver in it. You do the opposite. You start with the driver yea from the side. So when we decide on the package, we first decide on a driver's position. It's a heel

point of the axel point to your hip point. Heel point, Mutosan drew a line between the hip point of the stick figure driver and the floor of the car. The heel point meaning the position of the foot on the pedal. In every car that distance is different. In a big sedan like the Lexus LS, it's two hundred and forty five millimeters from the driver's hip to the car's floorboards.

In an LC, it's two hundred so two inches lower, which changes the angle of your hips, a subtle difference, which in turn changes the entire geometry of the car and the driver's position. And from there we went deep, deep into the weeds, until I felt like I too could climb blindfolded into an LC and know exactly where

I was. You may remember from two episodes ago that the origin of the LC came when the head of Toyota, Akio Toyota, went to a product launch at the legendary Concourse to Elegance in Pebble Beach, California, and an auto writer told him in front of everyone that Lexus was fine,

but boring ta and never boried, never boried. At least one well respected journalists you know was was doing an interview with doctor sonn mentioned his feeling that the Lexus brand was boring, and that was both a surprise and a shock Tokyo son And so when he came back, he said to all of these guys here, you don't never want to hear that maybe he has a very Step one in the anti boring campaign was making a

sports car that sounds exciting. This episode is about step two, a sports car that feels exciting to drive, which is a far more involved process than you might think. Lexus has six test tracks, most of them in Japan. There's one at the main facility in Toyota City, another in the Gulf of Nagoya, one in Higashifuji, one way up

north near Sapporo where they do winter testing. There's one more in Whitman, Arizona, outside Phoenix, a massive track that Lexus shares with Toyota that's ten miles around, the biggest test track in the world. You can land a jumbo jet in the middle of it, and every morning the sweepers have to go out and get the rattlesnakes off the tarmac where they gathered for warmth during the night.

But the crown jewel of Lexus test tracks Ishimoyama, about half an hour up into the hills outside of Toyota City, brand new, sixteen hundred acres across two mountaintops. Eventually there will be ten thousand people working there. The whole thing is so hidden away you'd never find it without directions. It's not on Google Maps. You can't get in unless you work for Lexus, and you can't drive on the

track unless you're certified Lexus driver. Lexus let Us in Shimu Yama is inspired by the most famous racing course in the world, the Nordschleifa at the Nurburgring in Germany's Rhineland. The Nurburgring is not a flat oval like the Indie five hundred. It's a road course twelve point nine miles of twists and turns, a thousand feet of elevation, changes, dense forest, medieval villages, the Eiffel Mountains. Current lap record is held by a Lamborghini Aventador. Second place is a

portion of nine eleven g T two rs. Race and sports cars are perfected here. Every curve is numbered and mythologized. The Nurburgring Nordschleifa is petrol Head Nirvana, former course record holder. By the way, the Lexus LFA Bananas Limited Editions supercar that Lexus made back in twenty eleven. So Shimo Yama is Lexus's answer to the Nordschleifa, a European style road course in the hills of southern Japan. It's insanely beautiful. The road cuts through the side of the mountains, surrounded

by tall Japanese pines. When we first got there, we stood out on the observation deck of the visitors center and all you can hear our birds chirping, and insects buzzing, and a blue sky above. Until Sweet Jesus is every curve a replica of a curve. Our pre track briefing

came from our guide, Paul Williamson. They're not direct replicas, but they kind of said, hey, you know, I really like to turn seventeen A, and then they go out and measure it and figure out what the grade change and how the road is cambered, and they say, okay, yeah, we can do something like seventeen A and so so basically they took kind of thirty eight of their favorite spots of the Nervagring and built them in here along with all these other European type road surfaces. And you

saw some of those undulations as we're driving in. I pointed that out, so you can see some some big areas where you know, if one more careless with speed, you can get everyonere and careless with speed. Classic euphemism. It's what you say when the highway patrol officer pulls you over. Officer, I got careless with speed. So we've got some fifteen degree ascents, twelve degree descents, pretty steep areas.

Some of the track is perfectly smooth asphalt. And by the way, I'm not sure why, but Japanese asphalt doesn't look like American asphalt. It looks like a putting green, if that makes any sense. So this country road course that you'll experience today simulates many different kinds of European roads.

It has seven unique road surfaces. So some is perfect smooth, gorgeous Japanese asphalt or probably closer to Germany fault like an autumn but others, and we'll ask Osakisan to do some lamps for you where it uses the off lane, and then the off lane will have little ripple surfaces. It'll have kind of a bolden block. Osakisan, he's Alexis master driver who agreed to take us out on the course.

He's driving Alexis LC five hundred and in fact, as you're being briefed by Paul I see Osakisan down below. In the off ramp area, taking three helmets out of the back of a gleaming white LC. I asked Paul if Osakisan and his fellow drivers keep a record of the fastest times around the course, like they do at the Nrburgring. He said no, not officially, because of course you know they do, like a secret list stashed away somewhere. We go downstairs to meet Osakisan. He's slender, light on

his feet, like an athlete. He's a surfer late forties, early fifties, although he seemed younger. He's what a Lexus is called takumi, a master, only one of two Takumi masters of driving. Feel in the entire Alexis company? You joined Lexus or Toyota? Yes? What did you think? You? What did you go into? Nineteen eighty five? So how long does it take to be certified as a Takumi driver? How many years needs you going? In June? Approximately about

twenty five to thirty years. Oh wow. Kasaki San's job is to drive prototypes as they're being developed and provide feedback. He's a frequent visitor to the Nrburgring, typically drives two hundred laps at a visit. Did I did I read somewhere that you you spent two years arguing about for a change in the angle of the steering wheel. Yes, yes, that's actually he was involved in that. What model was that?

So we started that discussion from GS, but then h LC was the actual first car that we're able to apply that change in the angle. What was the how much of a change in angle did you wanta? Angle? Two degrees? Two degrees? Was it hard to convince people

to change the angle of the string ways? Yeah, so you know, not only with the LC, but changing the steering angles actually also affixed the platform of other vehicles too, so you know, to really make any evolution as far as mindset, you know, that was that certainly took a

lot of determination to change. Twenty five years to get certified as at Takumi, two years of arguing to get the engineers back at Toyota City to tilt the LC steering two degrees forward because the proposed steering wheel angle just didn't feel right. Osaki San is a student of EI, which is one of the Japanese martial arts. At one point he took out his cell phone and showed us the photos of him working with his instructor Ei is the art of drawing a katan a sword in a smooth,

controlled manner. I A I EI. So listening there you go, let's see that. Yeah, it's an art to basically sword um um. So yeah, it's a form of art. Have you been doing this six years? Then Osaki San went into a long soliloquy about how similar the philosophy of EI was to the philosophy of Lexus savagery and elegance, abandon and control. Meanwhile, all I could think about is, even though I've been a carnet all my life, I've never driven with a race car driver on a closed

course before. I take that back. Once years ago I did a bunch of slalom runs around traffic cones at the Consumer Reports Test track, Consumer Reports, they test minivans. This is the real deal. I'm in full nine year old boy mode. Yeah, let's not been there. Lee. Let's see. So this is a we got a what what models? This is the twenty nineteen you say, dune in them? What they do? Yet it's cosy and this is a special edition we called Inspiration Edition. So you'll notice when

you get inside is a three color interior. Yeah, so it's a white orange and navy interior. Um there's only a few extra colors that work well with that combo. Pearl white is one of them. And then the Inspiration Edition in the US is also coupled with a luned slip differential and some other performance features. So it's a great handling, great driving, and beautiful style car. So this is I'm forgetting it. This is the one with with a this is the So this is a gas V eight.

If you've never driven at full speed around a race track before, let me explain a few things. Logically, you

would think it's a bit scary. Some of the curves at Shimoyama are hairpins, and there's not a lot of straightaways between them, so Asaki Song would come screaming out of a curve, hit the gas, the LC bolts forward, you get up, sometimes over one hundred pounds an hour, and then right in front of you, almost immediately is another curve, which in theory sounds a bit unnerving, except first of all, there's a Takumi driver behind the wheel,

cool as a cucumber, in fact, giggling. And secondly, you're in a sports car. I mean, if you were to take an suv out on the Shimayama. Each of those turns would be terrifying. That's because suv sit up high. They have a high center of gravity, as much as three feet in a big suv. At high speeds, an suv would pitch violently to one side in a corner like a ship in rough seas, and if you went too fast, it could spin out or even tip over. The center of gravity on Alexis LC, by contrast, is

super low even by sports car standards. Planted on those corners, there was almost no body roll at all. We never felt anything close to being out of control. There's a second, more subtle thing, and for that we have to leave shimo Yama for a moment. I promise will return back to Toyota City and Muto San stick figure of a driver because the way a car handles also comes down to its center of gravity and our anatomy from the side.

So when we decide on the package, who first decide on driver's position detailed point of the axel to your hip point a heel point. To make a car handle perfectly, you want the driver's hips to be as close to the center of gravity as possible, so you feel like the car is turning with you. Like, imagine for a moment that you have to carry a fifty pound package

on your bicycle. You could put it in a basket over the handlebars, but then the bike would be really hard to control because the center of gravity, the bulk of the weight would be over the front wheel way ahead of your hips. But if you strapped those weights around your waist, the bike would be much easier to control because now all of that weight would be over

the center of the bike. During our briefing with Mutosan, he talked about how hard Lexus worked to bring those two points, hips and center of gravity as close as possible. This is a twenty millimeter aviation almost same. How unusual is that in a in a sportscar sometimes with a two seater two hundred to three hundred millimeter gap. Oh well, they got a three hundred millimeter gap down to a twenty millimeter gap. Then I asked Mutosan why they couldn't

get that numbered down to zero? What was stopping you for having the center of gravity and the hippoint be absolutely perfect? I don't know. Does it bother you? Though you didn't say no sleep was lost over you didn't wake up in the middle of night saying, if only it was perfect. He's lying, of course, he totally loses sleep over those twenty millimeters. Then there's what happens to

your feet. In a typical small car, like a sports car, the engine intrudes into the middle of the passenger cabin, so you have to bring your ankles a little closer together to account for the size of the transmission. Muto San and his team didn't like that. It didn't feel natural to them, so they pushed the engine just a little bit forward and the front seats a little bit back. They wanted to create more space in the footwell. Mutasan drew the difference for us on the whiteboard. Two legs

angled slightly inwards, two legs extending straight. That's incorrect. How subtle is the difference between correct and incorrect on foot position? Twenty really made or two so maybe an inch? An inch? Now would most of us even notice that smaller difference, Maybe not explicitly, or at first, you wouldn't say to yourself when you sit in an LCOH, the angles of

my legs feel just that much better. But there are twenty or thirty subtle little variables like that, and when you combine them all then you really can sense that something's different. The point is that as Osaki San drove around the Shima Yama, the way he sat in the car, the way it felt to drive, the way I felt as he careened around corner wasn't an accident. It was a feeling engineered and created by the car's designers up without any of the electronics. It's the end of our

test drive. I thought we were going really fast, but Osakisan says that we had driven at about sixty percent of our capacity because we had four people in the car, Osakisan, me, the translator, and Jacob with his sound equipment. Now, who wants to drive at sixty percent capacity? I want to go faster, I want to drift, and to do that, the driver has to turn off all the electronic monitors that are built into modern cars to make them behave

like responsible citizens. So I'm asking can we turn them off? Asaki San says that's not allowed. Basically it requires a certain permit to actually drive around in that mode. So you know, maybe we could try like in specific point, but apparently today we basically obtain a permit to basically run in like basically not to overlap the lanes, but in order to do so with everything off, you kind of need to use the full track, full width of the track to cross over both lanes, so that apparently

requires a different permit application. He wasn't supposed to leave tire marks. It's a brand new track, blah blah blah. But then we kicked Jacob and his fancy recording equipment out of the car, and Osakisan thinks about it a minute longer, and he says, Okay, let's go for it, because Lexus isn't supposed to be boring, not anymore, And so I have something to boast about at dinner parties. I record what happens next on my phone. Oh yeah, baby, one of the top ten moments of my life. Oh wow,

serious drifting line. Yeah yeah, that's great. That was That was fantastic. That was one of the most fun I've had as a passenger in a car maybe ever. Go and See is produced by Jacob Smith with Emily Rosteck and Carly Migliari, edited by Julia Barton. Evan Viola composed our theme music and mixed and mastered our episodes. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg had of fame, Paul Williamson, the Mark Levinson engineers, and all the Lexus executives, engineers and

designer who participated in our recordings. Go and See is a production of Lexus and Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Rapin.