MIAMI, FLORIDA – MAY 04: Oscar Piastri of Australia and McLaren and Lando Norris of Great Britain and McLaren at the Lego drivers parade during the F1 Grand Prix of Miami at Miami International Autodrome on May 04, 2025 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Bryn Lennon – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images)
The thing about LEGO bricks is that you can build pretty much anything you can imagine. There are sets for the Millennium Falcon, the Eiffel Tower, Hogwarts, and even the Home Alone house. And, if there isn’t a set for that, there aren’t many things you can’t just build with the right collection of bricks.
But what about an F1 race car? I mean, LEGO already sells small versions of each team’s cars, but could you build a life-size version that you can actually drive on the circuit?
It turns out you can.
At the Miami Grand Prix today, LEGO showed off 10 full-size F1 cars built in each team’s colors and liveries. And, when I say “showed off,” I mean they drove them around the course for the drivers’ parade. It’s the latest—and biggest—piece of the partnership between LEGO Group and F1 that the companies announced last year.
LEGO F1 Activation during the F1 Grand Prix of Miami (Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty Images for LEGO Group)
“Through this partnership, fans will be able to recreate and reimagine the world of Formula 1, brick by brick, delving deeper into the intricacies of the mechanics and technology behind the sport through play,” said Emily Prazer, F1’s chief commercial officer. “We look forward to bringing the drama and excitement of Formula 1 to the LEGO Group’s passionate network of builders and giving our fans another means to enjoy the sport with their friends and family.”
I think it’s fair to say they delivered on the drama. It took a team of 26 builders 22,000 hours to build all 10 cars. Each car weighs twice as much as an actual F1 car and contains roughly 400,000 LEGO bricks. Those, by the way, are just standard LEGO bricks—the exact same thing you can buy in a set. In this case, they are built around a metal frame and held together with glue. The team also used electric motors and real Pirelli tires since they actually have to be able to drive on the course, but even the steering wheels are made of LEGO bricks.
The most interesting thing about the partnership is how the two brands overlap, but not necessarily in obvious ways. The fanbase for F1 racing has traditionally been a very different demographic from what you might expect from LEGO’s fanbase. I spoke with Julia Goldin, LEGO Group’s chief product and marketing officer, about the ambitious build and the company’s partnership with F1, and it turns out there’s a lot more crossover than you might think.
“The audience actually overlapped tremendously,” Goldin told me. “F1 acquired a whole new audience with Drive to Survive (the Netflix show), and that includes women, families, and it includes kids. From an audience perspective, we come at it from different angles, but in reality, we can bring a lot of excitement to our fans from different audience groups in a very inclusive and interesting way.”
LEGO F1 Activation during the F1 Grand Prix of Miami (Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty Images for LEGO Group)
Of course, building 10 life-sized F1 cars from LEGO bricks presents its own special challenges. It’s not like designing a set you can buy off the shelf at Target.
“When it comes to things like doing these life-size buildable cars, that’s that’s a different process because it’s not something that we’ve done before,” Goldin told me. “So it’s a massive engineering challenge of how you build the car, how do you make it drivable? What kind of software does it need to have? And then, of course, how do you bring all the different details to life? It’s a process that requires more creativity, ideation, innovation, and testing because of the fact that we’re doing something that we have never done before.”
Of course, just because it’s never been done before doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. It goes back to the idea that you can build pretty much anything with LEGO bricks again. For a brand like LEGO, that’s a powerful thing to show off on this scale. And that’s not just true for kids. LEGO Group’s fastest-growing audience is adults, which is reflected in the fact that the company now has entire lines of products devoted to sets appealing to adults.
“We have been really focused on understanding our audience’s passion points,” said Goldin. “That allowed us to broaden the brand tremendously because we’ve gone from being a toy for kids to being an amazing brand experience for all audiences.”
As for creating an amazing brand experience, if the response to the cars this weekend is any measure, I think it worked.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
