By Patrick George, 2015-09-14

In the briefest of moments, while while firing off a gear change at 9000 RPM with the banshee-like V10 wailing in my ears, I caught a glimpse of that L-shaped Lexus logo on the steering wheel. And as I gripped the wheel to wrest the car through the winding road, I wondered if I had somehow woken up in a parallel universe that morning instead of my own.

I’m driving a Lexus right now, I thought to myself, bewildered. What the hell?

This is the kind of extreme cognitive dissonance that comes with driving the Lexus LFA, one of the most unusual, deeply misunderstood and utterly brilliant cars to grace this universe or any other ones in the last 15 years.

The LFA is a car that a lot of enthusiasts know about, but don’t really know, if you catch my drift.

It’s a difficult car to comprehend. Here we have a sports car that cost, at $375,000, almost as much as a Lamborghini Aventador when it debuted. It sat on a bespoke platform rife with carbon fiber weaved by a gigantic loom built in-house. Its power came from a high-revving but relatively tiny 4.8-liter Yamaha V10 mated to a single-clutch sequential gearbox. Later a more powerful, more expensive (!) Nürburgring Package LFA lived up to its name and set one of the fastest ‘Ring times ever. Just 500 LFAs were ever built between 2010 and 2012.

All of that, from a brand that had spent most of its life up to that point cranking out some of the most narcolepsy-inducing cars on the road.

How is anyone supposed to make sense of that?

You can see the issue here, and you have to wonder what Lexus (or parent company Toyota) thought this thing would do for their brand or their bottom line.

So forget the question of “why?” for a second, because none of that changes what the LFA is: A wild, uncompromising, truly legitimate supercar.

Not a luxury car, not a GT car, not a boulevard cruiser; a supercar. The closest the Japanese have ever come to making a Ferrari, even more so than the original NSX. It is a Dodge Viper from 30 years in the future, made by people who grew up with posters of Gundams on their wall next to the posters of Countaches. It is the car the Nissan GT-R could have been.

You’re probably familiar by now with the LFA’s insane Formula One racecar-like engine and exhaust note. The entire car is like that, from top to bottom. As a total package, it’s just fing awesome. Its name stands for Lexus Fing Awesome.

This gunmetal grey car is not a press loaner from Lexus. It is owned by an enthusiast and friend of Jalopnik here in Austin who preferred to stay anonymous for this story, a man whose affable charm masks his considerable skills behind the wheel.

He’s a humble guy with a good job whose daily driver is usually his Toyota truck or his Honda sportbike, but when he got the chance to pick up an LFA recently, he decided to go for it. And then he was generous enough to let me have a turn with it.