D-Per4Mance - '00 Lexus Is200

[D-Per4mance]

Hi guys (and girls?),

Let me introduce myself.

My name is Fer, I'm 23 years old, living in Roermond in the south of the Netherlands.

I've always been a japanes car enthausiast. After some guy with a big fat BMW totalled my beloved '96 Civic Coupe I started searching for a new car. I always loved the looks of the Gen1 Lexus IS. So I started searching for a nice and clean IS200.

My previous car:

After about a month of searching and having seen many IS200's I found a Silver IS200 in Germany.

The car was for sale at the Lexus dealership in Cologne. Although it was the wrong color (I wanted a black, dark grey or blue IS) I decided to make the trip and have a look at the car.

When I arrived the car turned out to be even better than I hoped for. The car had 1 previous owner, a now 91 year old man, had always been serviced at the Lexus dealership with full history, had been stored in a garage and had only 56000km (35k miles!) on the odometer, which is very low for a year 2000 car. When I saw the car in real life I even kinda liked the silver color. Unfortunately it was the basic trim IS200, so it has cloth seats, a 4x4 ride height and it lacks the LSD, but I was pretty sure I wasn't going to find a cleaner car so I decided to buy it.

The car when I first bought it (with temporary plate for imported cars):

In the mean time I made some small modifications to the IS and I'm planning to do some more as I suck at keeping cars stock...

What I've done yet:

-18" Borbet alloys w. winter tyres

-Black housed the headlights and foglights

-Removed emblems from the trunk

-Painted grille black

-Added a Nurburgring sticker after driving some laps around the notorious Ring

Current state:

Planned mods:

-BC Racing Coilovers

-18" alloys w summer tyres

-Trust/Greddy frontlip

-Tanabe Touring medallion catback

-Recaro Speed front seats

-Leather interior

-HID Xenon conversion kit

-maybe an engine swap. 3sge from an Altezza is pretty tempting

-some small stuff I forgot to mention...

[noby76]

nice one there man! looks really clean for the year even thought its the basic model ...you really are not missing much without half leather, sunroof and electric seats to be honest...enjoy it

[LexIS200Sport]

welcome to the club. your photography skills is really good!

[D-Per4mance]

welcome to the club. your photography skills is really good!

Thanks, I'm trying to take as nice pictures as possible... Besides cars the photography is getting kind of a hobby to me.

Is there a place on the forum were people keep project topics about the mod's they do to their Lexus?

Found a few very interesting How-To's so signing up already paid of!

[north]

Welcome mate nice IS you have there... I would go for the Toyota supra twin turbo MK4 engine swap instead of the Altezza swap...

The reason being the engines potential and less problems with the rev counter since the Altezza is a 4 cylinder engine, And I know that in the Netherlands if you do a swap to a 4-cylinder engine you'll have to take it to the RDW for new papers and a test. Apart from that, bought swaps entail the same amount of work so get the best out of the supra ( + the fact that if you tune it properly you can get ridiculous BHP on the rear wheels) some have done that already but it is an expensive swap.

do a search and you'll find that there are a few projects on here with the engine swap... you'll be looking at the following parts:

- 2jz-gte engine with all auxiliaries and ECU and engine harness

- the manual gearbox from the Supra (this needs some work to get the gearstick in the right place)

- better fuel pump ( walbro does some nice ones)

- get the front and rear brakes (calipers & disc) from the supra or dish out on a big brake conversion

and a few parts you can get from the dealer on special order or get them from a breakersyard (sloperij in nederlands ;) from the Lexus GS300 like the oil sump,engine mounts ( as this car runs the NA engine version of the supra engine)

Also you are going to need a specialist to link the 2 ECU's together as the IS ecu is multiplex meaning that it runs all the electrics in the car ( air-conditioning, immobilizer, etc)

But if you've got that sorted people will drool over your IS200- which you have upgraded to the IS300 Twin Turbo ( only made by lexus to compete in the JDM DTM races )

Like I said it won't be cheap but you'll have less headaches doing this swap then the Altezza swap which needs an equal the amount of work

Also there is an option to go LS V8 engine but knowing the test in the Netherlands you will not get a pass on the test since the IS wasn't made with the V8 engine