- 10 LEGO -cars just drove around in Miamis F1 -Track
- They are each built from about 400,000 LEGO -Brick
- A 26-person team took over 22,000 hours to build all 10 cars
A new kind of electric vehicle took right to the Miami Grand Prix ahead of Sunday’s Formula One race there: 10 fully driving racing cars built almost exclusively out of LEGO.
The tailor -made large buildings – one for each of F1’s 10 teams – are close to 1: 1 scale with their F1 colleagues. They were constructed out of 400,000 LEGO bricks each and powered by an 8 kW electric motor, which allows them to reach speeds of 20 km/h (about 12 km/h).
The only non-lego elements are the engine, wheel rims and tires (each of which were taken from their respective F1 teams and pirelli for authenticity), the steering wheel (though decorated with LEGO) and the steel frame that attaches all these elements.
Glue and bolts also hold the bricks and frame together.
Otherwise, designers and engineers behind the buildings told me that they wanted this to be something that a child (with enough Lego brick) could build at home, or maybe construct a smaller version using fewer bricks and LEGO Technic Motors that can run around on a more manageable scale.
Built to run
The team behind F1 Big Builds explained that each car is based on its respective speed champions LEGO sets, blown from mini -scale to human scale. The only changes in the LEGO design were to incorporate space for two passengers rather than one and replace sticky elements with the same detail constructed from bricks (such as branding and logos that decorate each vehicle).
Once the outer LEGO design was decided, the engineers had to find out how a steel frame and engine would be incorporated to make it move.
“We’re Lego, so our designs are always bricks first,” they explained. “So we created the LEGO design and then built a frame and engine design that would fit in Lego rather than the other way around.”
Apparently, their only big challenge with this brick-first approach was to find out how to make the front wheels turn, considering the tight space that the steel frame had to move. They were forced to come up with a new approach compared to their former moving Lego Big Builds, but once it was resolved, they were off to the races.
The project has been a great job of love.
The 26-person strong design team spent over 22,000 combined hours working on the cars in Legos Kladno factory located in the Czech Republic, and it was their first time working on so many cars at once in a tight timeframe.
“We had about eight months to build all 10 cars, which is the time we might take for one.”
But about 4 million bricks later (which accounts for about two -thirds of each Big Build’s 1,500 kg of weight) they said that seeing all 10 cars together for the first time in Miami was “definitely worth it.”
