Attention to Detail

F1 superfan and Lego ambassador Nicole, who goes by the name GirlBricksALot, concurs. “Down to the spoons for the side view mirrors, the tiles that are used for the camera mount on top, even the cheese slope piece on the front wing—they’re identical,” she says. “Every part of the car is satisfying.”

This isn’t Lego’s first Big Build in this space. In 2018, its designers brought that same commitment to authenticity with the drivable 1:1 Lego Bugatti made from Lego Technic elements (that’s Lego’s engineering line with rods, gears, and axles). Last year, McLaren driver Lando Norris took a Lego Technic P1 all the way around the course at Silverstone. But building ten authentic, driveable cars in eight months has been a feat on a different scale.

Each one of these is, of course, a masterful marketing operation, with Lego keen to promise this level of attention to detail has filtered down to the versions that you can build at home for $30—bringing racing fans closer to the cars they might never see in real life. A bit like Drive to Survive, it feels that Lego Speed Champions is serving as an entryway into a sport that has been opaque and inaccessible to so many for most of its history—something Nicole says she experienced as a young fan.

“[As a kid], I would follow F1 with articles or YouTube snippets,” she said. “You couldn’t even watch it. It’s impossibly hard to get into the sport as a driver, and it was impossibly expensive to go to.”