10 Lego cars just raced the F1 Miami Grand Prix track – here’s how they were built

• 10 Lego cars just drove around Miami’s F1 track
• They’re each built from around 400,000 Lego bricks
• A 26-person team took over 22,000 hours to build all 10 cars

A new kind of electric vehicle just took to the Miami Grand Prix ahead of Sunday’s Formula 1 race there: 10 fully drivable racecars built almost entirely out of Lego.

The bespoke big builds – one for each of F1’s 10 teams – are close to 1:1 scale with their F1 counterparts. They were constructed out of 400,000 Lego bricks each and powered by an 8kW electric engine, which allows them to reach speeds of 20km/h (roughly 12mph).

The only non-Lego elements are the engine, the wheel rims and tires (which were each sourced from their respective F1 teams and Pirelli for authenticity), the steering wheel (though it is decorated with Lego), and the steel frame attaching all these elements.

Also, glue and bolts are holding the bricks and frame together.

Otherwise, the designers and engineers behind the builds told me that they wanted this to be something that a kid (with enough Lego bricks) could build at home, or perhaps construct a smaller version using fewer bricks and Lego Technic motors that can drive around on a more manageable scale.

Built to drive

The team behind the F1 big builds explained that each car is based on its respective Speed Champions Lego set, blown up from minifigure to human scale. The only changes to the Lego design were to incorporate space for two passengers rather than one and replace stickered elements with the same detailing constructed from bricks (such as the branding and logos decorating each vehicle).

Once the outer Lego design was decided, the engineers had to work out how a steel frame and engine would be incorporated to make it move.

“We are Lego so our designs are always bricks first,” they explained. “So we created the Lego design then built a frame and engine design that would fit inside the Lego rather than the other way around.”

Apparently, their only major challenge with this brick-first approach was working out how to make the front wheels turn, given the tight space the steel frame had to move. They were forced to come up with a new approach compared to their previous moving Lego big builds, but once that was solved, they were off to the races.

The project has been a major labor of love.

The 26-person strong design team spent over 22,000 combined hours working on the cars in Lego’s Kladno factory located in the Czech Republic, and it was their first time working on so many cars at once in a tight time frame.

“We had around eight months to build all 10 cars, which is the time we might take for one.”

But roughly 4 million bricks later (which account for around two-thirds of each big build’s 1,500kg weight) they said seeing all 10 cars together for the first time in Miami was “definitely worth it.”

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