- 10 LEGO COVENS HAVE BEEN DRIVING Around the F1 track of Miami
- Each is built from around 400,000 Lego bricks
- A team of 26 people took more than 22,000 hours to build the 10 cars
A new type of electric vehicle has just taken to the Miami Grand Prix before the Formula 1 career on Sunday: 10 totally manageable races built almost completely in Lego.
The big custom constructions, one for each of the 10 F1 teams, are close to scale 1: 1 with their counterparts F1. They were built with 400,000 Lego bricks each and fed by an 8KW electric motor, allowing them to reach speeds of 20 km/h (approximately 12 mph).
The only elements that are not from the Lego are the engine, the tires and tires of the wheel (each came from their respective F1 and Pirelli equipment for authenticity), the steering wheel (although it is decorated with lego) and the steel frame that joins all these elements.
In addition, the glue and bolts keep the bricks together and the frame.
Otherwise, the designers and engineers behind the constructions told me that they wanted this to be something that a child (with enough Lego bricks) could build at home, or perhaps build a smaller version using less bricks and engines of Lego that can lead to a more manageable scale.
Built to drive
The team behind the great F1 constructions explained that each car is based on its Speed Champions Lego set, exploited from a minifigure to the human scale. The only changes in the design of Lego were to incorporate space for two passengers instead of one and replace elements attached with the same details built from bricks (such as the brand and the logos that decorate each vehicle).
Once the external Lego design was decided, the engineers had to find out how a steel frame and an engine would be incorporated to move.
“We are Lego, so our designs are always bricks first,” they explained. “So we create the design of Lego and then build a frame and engine design that would fit inside the Lego instead of the other way around.”
Apparently, his only important challenge with this brick approach was first to solve how to turn the front wheels, given the adjusted space that the steel frame had to move. They were forced to find a new approach compared to their great constructions of Lego in anterior motion, but once it was resolved, they went to the races.
The project has been a great love work.
The 26 people’s strong design team spent more than 22,000 hours combined working in the records at the Kladno de Lego factory located in the Czech Republic, and it was the first time that he worked in so many cars at the same time in a tight period of time.
“We had about eight months to build the 10 cars, which is the time we could take for one.”
But approximately 4 million bricks later (representing about two thirds of the weight of 1,500 kg of each large construction) said that seeing the 10 cars together for the first time in Miami “definitely worth it.”
