These Formula 1 cars are made of 400,000 lego pieces—and they can drive

Most F1 cars can reach speeds of well over 200 mph, but the newest automobiles in the F1 stable go much much slow. Built from 400,000 Lego pieces, the life-size Lego cars can drive 12 mph—not bad for a bunch of plastic bricks.

To mark the start of a multiyear partnership, the Danish toy maker created 10 drivable, full-scale Formula 1 cars that debuted at the Miami Grand Prix. The racing series’ 20 competitors, including speed demons Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, drove the Lego cars at Sunday’s prerace Drivers’ Parade for millions of fans watching from the grandstands and on television.

The “big build” cars took Lego builders a collective 22,000 hours over eight months to assemble the four million pieces. It’s Lego’s most challenging project by size and scale, according to Chief Marketing Officer Julia Goldin. The cars showcase each team’s distinctive livery but share the cockpit, chassis, and components necessary to cover the circuit’s three-mile inaugural lap.  

“We each want to push the art of impossible, to push the boundaries,” Goldin told Fast Company in an interview on Friday at the trackside Lego Garage.

Drivable, life-size Legos

Lego has made a mark with life-size, or larger-than-life, public art installations at institutions from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to the Volvo Museum in Sweden.

But the Formula 1 cars boast a novel distinction, says Marcel Šťastný, the project’s lead engineer: They’re ready for the race track. 

The nearly 1:1 scale models reach about 12 mph using automotive parts contained within the structure and authentic Pirelli tires. They herald Lego’s new Speed Champions product line based on race cars from Ferrari, McLaren, and other teams, with accessories from driver minifigures in full racing gear to replacement hub caps.

Of course, they differ from actual Formula 1 cars in two key ways: performance and design. A modern F1 car uses a 1.6-liter V6 turbo engine and two electric motors to produce around 1,000 horsepower and travel upwards of 200 mph. And unlike the official single-seat race cars, Lego’s design fits two people. Lego created the dual cockpit specifically in order to accommodate each team’s driver pairs during the parade. 

“The beginning of the concept was really fitting two people inside, and then we built the rest of the car around the cockpit,” says Jonathan Jurion, the project’s senior designer.

But making room for two people inside the car wasn’t the project’s only challenge. Since the competitors didn’t get a test run ahead of the public debut, Lego also had to create adjustable seats and pedals within the cockpit to accommodate the drivers’ heights. The project’s engineering manager specialist Martin Šmida says his team used animation runs and personal measurements to ensure a fit on race day.

And then there was the compressed timeline, with the project kicking off last August.

“We did 10 cars in the amount of time it would normally take to do one car,” Jurion says. “We didn’t want to cut any corners, so we had to think out of the box how to streamline the process while creating a custom design for each one.”

From CAD to hand-built

Despite a frenetic start off the line, the project began with the same computer-aided design exercise used by the 400-plus Lego products launched each year.

“We model the cars first in the computer because it’s a huge amount of bricks,” Jurion says. “We have specialists who work on the shapes and forms, and others who work on the design of the detailing and logos.”

The design then shuffles through the pipeline, to technical engineers and manufacturing engineers “who make sure that we can build these, because it’s not really an easy task,” he adds.

Designers and engineers used foam mockups to collaborate on a layout that hid the drivetrain, which includes a motor and a 105 amp-hour battery. (Lego cut its teeth last year on a full-scale McLaren P1 that Lando Norris took for a spin on England’s Silverstone Circuit. But instead of traditional Lego bricks, that car used bolts, gears and pins from Lego’s advanced Technic system.)

“We have special builders who really know how to build these huge builds, and they take the building instructions from the manufacturing engineers and then build them, kind of layer by layer, like we would build a house,” Jurion adds.

The cars were assembled by hand at Lego’s factory in the Czech Republic but glued together for their Formula 1 debut. “All the bricks you can see are off-the-shelf bricks,” Jurion says. “Potentially, if anyone has enough bricks, they could build them at home.” 

“Gluing the bricks together is obviously something that we don’t want our fans to do in real life, but we had to do it so that we keep the cars together,” he added. “We don’t want to lose any bricks on track.”

Multiyear growth

Lego and Formula 1 alike have long had loyal fans willing to shell out top dollar for the experience, but both brands have surged in popularity—especially among women, children and families, according to Goldin—since the COVID-19 pandemic. A new audience turned, or returned, to Lego sets during lockdown, boosted by the LegoMasters reality television series, while Netflix’s Drive to Survive, now filming its eighth season, has brought millions of new fans to motorsports. 

Data show that F1 has seen a particular surge in growth among children between ages 8 and 12. Lego continues to grow, as well, slated to begin construction on its first U.S. factory, a $1 billion factory outside Richmond, Virginia, in mid-2027.

Goldin declined to provide the total investment figure for the Formula 1 partnership but says there’s more to come. “This sets the bar high, but we definitely don’t think of this as a one-off.”

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