Jeremy Clarkson wants to buy a Lexus LFA: ‘oh my god this is just absolute joy’

“An LFA still lives in my head as a car I’d love to own,” said Jeremy Clarkson. “They’re just pre ‘peak car’.”

Speaking to the Autocar podcast, the former Top Gear and The Grand Tour presenter admitted that if he could buy anything today, he’d quite like a Lamborghini Revuelto – “astounding, so unbelievably exciting, what a Lamborghini should be” – and a V10 Lexus LFA.

Despite not being able to put the seat belt on, or that he thinks it’d be more practical to have an EV because it’s got a “zippo lighter for a fuel tank”, he still covets Lexus’s limited edition 5.0-litre Noughties supercar because “it’s the sound it makes”.

A sound created by an internal combustion engine that – according to Clarkson – is the ‘soul’ of a car.

“When the LFA came out, the reviews were kind of… nobody got excited by it. And then I drove it, and I was priapic. The sound [was like] a ‘wounded bear’ is how I described it, a wailing noise. Also, it had that dashboard you could move around which was unusual in those days.

“I thought ‘oh my god this is just absolute joy’. And I got the loveliest, loveliest letter from the guy [who engineered it], who said ‘nobody really got my car until you came along’. So he was thrilled. He sent me a book on it. The world’s most boring book, [but] very detailed!

“That’s a car I still treasure,” he added.

His views on electric cars are well documented, of course. “I’m never having one,” he added. “I don’t understand them, and I don’t like the driving characteristics. I think if you take a car’s engine away, you’ve taken away its soul. And you can’t love something that has no soul. What else gives a car its soul? It’s its engine.

“I don’t understand how engines work, really. I love it when I find a good one because it’s like witchcraft. Sorcery has happened to create this amazing-sounding engine,” he said.

Photography: Lee Brimble/Justin Leighton