“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.”
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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.
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
