Drawings Reportedly Show the Lexus LFR That Never Was

Drawings described as Japanese design filings show the Lexus LFR supercar as it would have looked before Toyota turned the car into the GR GT.

At first glance the front end looks like the GR GT, but a spindle shape runs from the top of the hood down to the bottom of the bumper, with a different grille between the headlights and slightly reshaped lamps. The rear is where the Lexus really shows itself. It carries semi-stacked exhaust tips that are offset in the style of Lexus F cars, while the GR GT uses two tips side by side, and that one detail is enough to make the car read as a Lexus rather than a Toyota with a new grille.

The drawings were reported by Lexus Enthusiast, which calls them Japanese patent drawings and credits a member of its own forums for them. The article doesn’t link that forum post or any filing, so we couldn’t verify the images with the source. It gives no filing office, registration number or filing date, and we couldn’t find the drawings among the passenger-car designs most recently registered to Toyota in the Japan Patent Office’s J-PlatPat database. Neither Lexus nor Toyota has confirmed that the drawings show the LFR.

Lexus Enthusiast describes the LFR’s lights as a single horizontal bar with layered curves that rise at each end, which it compares to the current NX, and it notes mesh around the exhaust at the bottom of the bumper.

According to the outlet, the LFR was engineered from the start as a race car with a road-going version, so most of its body and aero carried over when Toyota decided to sell it as the GR-branded GT. Lexus registered the LFR name in Europe back in 2022.

The Toyota Report Take

If these drawings are what they appear to be, Lexus came close to a proper successor to the LFA and handed it to Gazoo Racing instead. The GR GT should be a great car, but the stacked exhausts and full-height spindle show a Lexus with its own identity, which makes the decision to drop the badge feel like a real loss for the brand.