“There were a lot of great submissions, but there was something about [Evans’] design that really spoke to us – or I should say, spoke to me in terms of a SEMA project to build,” Ishihara says. “When I was looking at the other submissions, a lot of these guys were altering the grille. And as you know, the front grill of a vehicle – that’s its marque – you don’t want to [change] that. Even though there were some radical designs, I had to shy away from them because the Lexus brand is embodied in that spindle grille. A lot of thought and planning went into the development of that, and to have it altered really changes the brand’s identity.”
In fact, the grille was much of the inspiration for the rest of Evans’ design. Along with a wickedly-aggressive front bumper and splitter, the low, wide-slung grille is accentuated by larger air inlets, a lower stance and one of the wildest wide bodies yet.
On the wheel end, a set of one-off Nutek forged three-pieces sit 20 inches round in the front and rear, wrapped in 285/30R20s up front and 345/25R20s in the back. The -59 and -30 offsets put this setup nearly eight inches out from the stock bodywork, and that’s where VIP’s skills were put to the test.
This isn’t any ordinary wide body, and because the team had just a month-and-a-half to build it, they employed some old-school foam and fiberglass techniques to get the IS 350 show floor ready in the nick of time.
“We basically hand-sculpted it with a small knife and sanding materials; layer by layer, just sculpting it, getting it to where it needed to be,” Ishihara recalls. “Typically, what you’d do is take the foam mold – basically the foam becomes the mold – and you take the reverse plug from that and that becomes your part. But we ran out of time, so we had to leave it as is. If we had more time, we would’ve used clay for all the parts, but that process takes a long time; for each layer of clay you put down it’s like a 24-hour dry time. So we fiberglassed over it, smoothed it out, then shot it with paint. We literally finished it a couple of days before SEMA.”
Extending at the front, the bodywork is draped over half of the wheel, leaving the back section open for a rear winglet that pushes air down the side of the car and into the side splitter. At the top, an engine cooling vent sits in front of the F Sport badge, which, combined with the seven-spindle Nutek wheels and massive six-piston 380 mm Brembo brakes, is nothing short of a masterpiece of shapes and contours.
Moving toward the rear quarter panel, the side splitter blends seamlessly into a giant rear duct in front of the wheel, which could easily be routed for brake cooling. A discerning eye might also notice the rear bodywork is built over the back doors rendering them useless, but given the time constraints to produce a finished product, it’s something that would have otherwise been accommodated, so we’ll give them a get-out-of-jail-free card here.
Where the design is most engaging with the original IS is at the tail end of the car. Evans intuitively played on the new, extended taillights to blend his wide-body and bumper lines for a quasi factory-finish look. His design language from the front wheel work also carries over to the back for a uniform finish. The redesigned two-tone bumper and rear diffuser completes a look that could have easily come from the Lexus concept studio.
A Universal Air Suspension with AccuAir I-Level control gives the car a nice, tight stance, but it’s even more impressive given that VIP was forced to build the car without the custom wheels, which were being built simultaneously with the car.
“The craziest part [of the build] was sculpting the body without the wheels because they are one-off customs,” Ishihara says. “But the measurements were pretty good. When you’re sculpting, there are a lot of measurements, so making sure everything was on par for the specifications of the entire build was important. We were going to do a 345 tire, but it came to the point when we weren’t able to test out too many tires, so we went the safe route to make sure we had a tire that was nice and stretched to fit.”
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