GOODWOOD. NOT THE most inspiring of places. It’s one of the more anonymous suburbs of Cape Town, wedged between the Youngsfield military base and the N1 motorway, and in my youth I spent many a day there playing street cricket.

IMAGE GALLERY

Courtesy of South Africa’s colonial history, it’s a place that takes its title – ironically enough – from a rather grand British lineage: Goodwood Estate, home to the Dukes of Richmond.

That Goodwood has a rather different motoring tradition. Most petrolheads are well acquainted with an annual weekend event where drivers take turns racing up the Lord of March’s driveway, at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. The true drawing power is the classic 3.8km circuit, nestled deep within the confines of the estate, bordering the town of Chichester.

So when Lexus invited me to join them at Goodwood (on a date after the fabled Festival of Speed) I knew there would have to be a sweetener. The automotive truffle in question was an opportunity to drive the most sophisticated (and ridiculously expensive) Japanese supercar ever built on a circuit which claimed the life of my racing idol – Bruce McLaren. I agreed in an instant, initiating a bothersome period of sleepless nights. Not hard to reason why.

Like most of Britain’s celebrated circuits (Silverstone, Donington and Snetterton come to mind), Goodwood came into being courtesy of the RAF’s WWII effort. The centre of the circuit is still home to an active airfield.

Fast, narrow and forbiddingly dangerous, racing did not last long here. It was officially abandoned in 1966 due to safety concerns. To gauge the gravity of this decision, ponder how low the safety threshold in F1 was back in the 1960s, when the Nordschliefe was still part of the racing calendar.

Despite Lord March adding a mighty inventory of tyres as crash barrier protection in the late 1990s, Goodwood is a safer (rather than safe) circuit to drive on.

At my arrival, parked in front of the main pit building, is something very much at odds with Goodwood’s period architecture: the Lexus LFA. It’s unquestionably the most outlandish and sophisticated Nipponese supercar yet.

As a venture for Toyota, it’s pure madness. With the LFA production run limited to 500 units, Lexus is set to lose money on every car it has a signature against. Hardly typical Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) operating procedure. Then again, the LFA is hardly your standard Toyota. Or Lexus. It is, plainly, a Japanese 599 GTO clone.

Everything about the LFA is diametrically opposed to the manner in which Toyota conducts its business. Take the development timetable. If you were born at the moment Haruhiko Tanahashi held his first briefing as project chief engineer you would have turned ten by the time the LFA debuted at last year’s Tokyo motor show.

The reason for this glacial development cycle was Tanahashi’s decision to change the car’s structure from aluminium to more exotic (and lighter) carbon fibre four years into the project. Imagine having to deliver that PowerPoint presentation to the TMC board. Fortunately Toyota’s heritage as a weaving company (its core business a century ago) enabled Tanahashi to build an in-house composite fabricating capacity of aeronautic quality – a state of affairs set to benefit more Toyotas in future.