- Lego and F1 join forces again, this time at the Silverstone GP
- This year the drivers will travel the track with 22 Lego karts
- The parade will take place on Sunday just before the official race.
Lego and Formula 1 have teamed up again for a great project, and I think I might be more excited about this year’s parade than the Silverstone Grand Prix.
If you somehow missed it, last year at the 2025 Miami GP, Lego introduced a roughly life-size car for each team, perfectly mimicking their real cars, except each had seating space for two drivers instead of one. Then everyone took a lap of the circuit, with the cars powered by a small electric motor.
This year the cars are a little smaller, but the so-called mini cars are still assembled from more than 28,000 bricks. Think of them as karts because that’s essentially what they are: they even have wheels suitable for karts.
The big changes this year apart from the smaller size: each driver has their own car, meaning there are 22 on the grid and they have a higher top speed of 25km/h, and this year Lego has accepted that the drivers will let their competitive side take control.
After seeing the show in Miami, I couldn’t be more excited for this year’s Lego parade. The Lego karts look fantastic in person (each is kitted out with the appropriate team livery) but also delightfully cute, and while there’s a clear link to the big builds we saw last year, this doesn’t feel like a simple repeat.
As Julia Goldin, Lego’s director of product and marketing, told me, this year’s goal was: “Not just to replicate, but to build on what we did last year. We wanted to have something that was visually stunning, that was fun for all the drivers, and then also bring even more to the fans who loved watching the drivers unleash their joy in Miami.”
“A return of chaos, childish joy and laughter”
Despite being expressly told not to compete in the Miami Lego activations (risking damaging the cars and scattering broken Legos around the track before the Miami GP), the most competitive men on the planet couldn’t help but try to outdo each other in their brick cars.
Some even did some non-race legal maneuvers, including taking shortcuts they could only dream of using in a real GP.
This made the show even more fun to watch. Described by Lego as “a twist of chaos, childlike joy and laughter”, it couldn’t have better captured the emotions Lego hopes to inspire.
For the engineers behind the construction of Miami and now the construction of Silverstone, the response could not have been better.
“It was fantastic to see how the parade inspired people and really showed that there is so much potential for creativity in every Lego piece.”
Because while it’s just one lap for the drivers, it’s 6,400 hours of design and construction for the 20-person team that built the 22 cars. And even though this year’s versions were a little smaller, the vehicles had their own challenges.
“Last year we took the Lego Champions cars and expanded them about 30 times. We had a very clear plan for the final builds. This year we had to start from scratch.” says senior designer Jonathan Jurion.
“Also, instead of fitting the components into the shape of the Lego build like we did in Miami, we had to fit the Lego around the shape of the components. At the same time, we wanted all the cars to have the team’s livery and feel inspired by the F1 cars.”
The end result of this balancing act is the cars we have in the Lego Garage at Silverstone, and now all eyes are on Sunday for the unofficial race we’re all waiting for.
With Lego racing becoming an annual tradition in F1, I asked the engineering team what the plans are for 2027.
Jurion told me that the team is “100% focused” on Sunday, but that they are interested in maintaining the partnership and continuing to “wow” fans with what the Lego brick can do, adding that “the sky is the limit.”
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