Lexus IS F Sport model teased – NA V8 power coming?

There’s something interesting brewing at Lexus, one that it is keeping quite close to its chest. The company will be revealing a new F Sport model at midnight and has released two deliberately vague teasers to get us interested in the car.

One image shows a carbon fibre panel with an F Sport badge on it, while the other reveals the rear quarter-light window. That’s not much to go on, but the upswept window line and the fact that the rear door shutline goes past the trailing edge of the side windows confirm that the car is based on the new IS.

Of course, the IS already has a look-faster F Sport variant, but Lexus is promising to debut “a new era of F Sport performance vehicles.” This suggests that whatever upgrades the company has planned will go beyond aesthetics, perhaps including a new or upgraded engine.

Rumours have been swirling regarding an IS 500 or a full-fat IS F for a while now. Last year, we reported that Lexus had filed a trademark for the former, with the possibility of the expected car using either the 5.0 litre naturally-aspirated V8 from the LC 500 or a 3.5 litre twin-turbo V6 borrowed from the LS 500.

Those rumours began to solidify earlier this month in an article from Japan’s Best Car Web, stating that there will be an IS F with the aforementioned V8 as part of the 2UR-GSE mill’s last hurrah. If you look at the second teaser, you can see that the contours of the carbon fibre piece match the engine cover of the RC F and GS F – right down to the shape of the slot for the F Sport badge, where an F badge would normally sit.

If the reports are correct, the IS 500 (the most likely moniker, given that it still wears F Sport badges) will feature the V8 at its zenith, producing the same 481 PS as the Japanese-spec RC F. That’s more than the base BMW M3 and it should even have comparable torque figures, although Munich’s turbo engine will produce max twist much further down the rev range. It won’t have the Lexus’ sonorous engine note, however.

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