Everything is familiar, except it isn’t. Not quite. There is shotgun neon, and purposeful bustle. There are huddles of shops, striding people and the pulse of commerce, industrious swarms of taxis and more neon, layered upon each other in a deluge of information that arrives in a rush, breathless and unapologetic. A million little stories played out in seconds, like any modern city in the world.

But there’s a subtle flavour of wrong. The smallest of inconsistencies, as shocking as an unexpected grain of sand caught between your teeth. The neon is in kanji, logographic symbols instead of letters, the shops unfamiliar and often inscrutable, because I’m sure that the store called simply ‘Green Peas’ sells other things, too.

The people are compact and – generally – more precise in their steps, beautiful and interesting and foreign. I may be driving on the left, from the right-hand side of the car, but the taxis are blocky Toyota Crowns and Nissan Cedrics, two-toned and fender-mirrored, heaved from a styling book of 30 years past.

I just stare for a bit. Because even in 2018, Tokyo, from a westerner’s perspective, is so brilliantly other, you never get bored of it. The disconnection of the language, the slippery notions of subtly dissimilar manners and customs; it makes it exciting in a way that feels like learning something new. I cruise past the Park Hyatt and realise that I’m becoming Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. Except my Scarlett Johansson has morphed into a hairy photographer called Mark. Bummer.

I do have some good-looking company, mind you. And although it is showing me the late-night sights, it still has its own flavour of difference. The format might be known; a big, front-engined V8 coupe of the two-plus-no variety (the rear seats suitable only for shelving) and there’s a 10-speed proper auto, rear drive and a long bonnet. Yet it is styled in such a way that it could be nothing but Japanese, the complex weave of angles that no one else manages quite so effectively. It is a Lexus LC500. And it is at home.

There’s another reason we’re here, though. This is a big luxury grand tourer, woofly and accommodating, yet in Japan, it leads a Batman-esque double life in the best race series you’ve probably never heard of.

It’s called Super GT, a hotly contested hardcore series with wing-heavy GT500 racers that run eight to 10 seconds a lap faster than current GT3 cars. The current champion is the KeePer TOM’S LC, piloted by two of the youngest drivers in the entire series, and we’re here to follow their progress at this weekend’s race at Mount Fuji Speedway. But first we have to get there, and I’m taking the scenic route.

Next day, we go and visit a few places, meet a few people, have a nose around Tokyo and its environs. The LC is docile and comfortable, albeit low and wide and not entirely suited to town work. So we head out to the Hakone Turnpike for a bit of a drive.

Essentially a scenic toll road, Hakone is brilliant for getting out of the city, and the LC laps up every single sweeping curve. It’s not pretty at the top, the mountains austere, and withdrawn, and grumpy. The cloud a mantle of grey drawn about the tops like a cloak of disappointment.

It is not, however, what you might consider to be the perfect base for a racecar. It’s too luxurious, too urbane, too suited to its aesthetic pitch. But when we eventually roll up to Fuji the next day after a glorious three-hour wander through the mountains, we glide into the pitlane to find the motorsport Hyde to the roadgoing LC’s Dr Jekyll.

The sun only winched itself in the sky and started chucking around daylight about an hour ago, and already it’s 40 degrees, but seeing the racing LC ratchets up the heat a little more. The KeePer TOM’S LC is Manga made real, swollen with vented carbon arches, flattened to the floor, shaded by its own enormous wings. And it looks like it’s going to bite someone’s head off.

You can see the resemblance, that this is an LC, but once you dig a little deeper, you find that the Super GT cars are familiar skins draped over a skeleton of hardcore motorsport. The tub is carbon, the panels are carbon, the wings are carbon.

The motor is the class-standard 2.0-litre four-cylinder with a Garrett blower, supposedly producing around 550bhp – though we later find out it’s probably nearer to 680. And although it’s a shame it’s not a V8, the raw and guttural edge to the noise makes up for the lack of cylinders. There’s a six-speed sequential paddle shift, carbon brakes, and the whole thing weighs in at just over a tonne. Getting on for half the weight of the road car.

Six LC outfits fight tooth-and-nail in the Super GT500 championship with main rivals from Nissan (GT-R) and Honda (NSX), all with the ‘same’ engine. And they go fast. Racing on the same circuit as GT300 class cars (essentially semi-production GT3), they circulate at Fuji so quickly that they lap the GT300s every fourth lap.

It’s like Le Mans condensed into a violently short track, each 500-mile race a battle royale of overtaking, tactics and endurance, pitched against a background of loads of different cars: there are GT-Rs and NSXs, Audi R8s and Lamborghini Huracáns, AMG GT Rs and a Bentley Continental. There’s even a GT3-spec Toyota Prius. Really.

Exciting doesn’t quite cover it, and although it also means that it can be quite confusing – especially with Japanese-only commentary – you get more overtaking in the first 10 minutes of racing than you do in an entire season of Formula One. Jenson Button decamped here after emerging from F1 to race the Raybrig NSX-GT for Team Kunimitsu, and you can see why – this is undoubtedly a racer’s series.

Race day, and Fuji is a circus. There are people dressed in mascot costumes who will obviously die when the sun reaches its peak, grid girls dressed in plastic shorts and towering heels, dragging with them attendant gaggles of middle-aged men who treat them like royalty. One set of drivers faces the TV cameras wearing cat ears and paw gloves (I’m not kidding), and there’s an aerial acrobatic display which concludes with the stunt plane flying down the main straight at just 20ft of elevation. I’m accosted by a man dressed as a blue devil who insists I take his picture and asked politely by a tiny Japanese woman if she can take mine. I’m still not sure why.

We decamp to the first corner to await the start, and when the flag drops, the bulls**t stops. The Super GT cars have a rolling start half a lap ahead of the GT3s, and I swear I thought not a single one would get around the first right-hand bend, such was the speed at which they approached the corner. They don’t so much brake as delete speed, still turning in at aero-assisted triple-digit mph. KeePer TOM’S gets through, and I watch aghast as an angry swarm of GT3s fusses through the first corner a moment later.

On the journey back to Tokyo, the main thought is that it’s surprising that Super GT isn’t more popular globally. Set against a backdrop of overly managed motorsport like F1, this is an adrenaline-fuelled delve into the dark side, where drivers are forced to really drive. It’s characterful, and exciting and a bit weird.

Which is pretty much the conclusion I’ve also come to with the LC500. Lexus has an image of producing well-made but slightly boring machines generally, punctuated by moments of pure brilliance. And the LC500 feels like a blue-collar LFA; styled like a spaceship, but with the kind of driving experience that puts a hard-to-shift grin on your face.

In a world where the hegemony feels like it’s closing in, Lexus has made a statement, and it’s a strong one. We track back towards the glittering lights of the city buzzing from the day’s racing, V8 soothing away the miles, and smile. Like I said, everything is familiar, except it isn’t. And that’s what makes it so utterly special.

- Tom Ford