Watch: McLaren’s Formula One driver, Lando Norris, drives the one-off around the legendary Silverstone race circuit.
Formula 1 driver Land Norris has been performance testing a very special vehicle – a McLaren P1 made entirely from Lego bricks.
The car is built up of a total of 342,817 elements and weighs around 1,220kg. Even though the body is made up entirely of Lego, it has traditional mechanical components to make sure it still drives like the normal car. It has fully functional steering, an electric motor which features a standard battery pack and Lego Technic function batteries to make the car go for longer, too.
A total of 23 specialists for its design, engineering, and building from the Lego Group and McLaren Automotive spent a total of 8,344 hours developing the car as well as 393 different types of Lego Technic elements that go into the P1.
To make sure the car worked as it should, McLaren decided to use its Formula One driver, Lando Norris, to complete a lap around the legendary Silverstone race track – which is the ideal location as it holds a lot of history for the McLaren brand.
Ben Gulliver, test and development director for McLaren Automotive, said: “Having worked on the original P1 programme for McLaren, it’s amazing to see so many of the elements from the original McLaren P1 brought to life so realistically by the Lego Technic Team for the full-scale model.”
He added: “This project marks the latest in a long list of collaborations between the Lego Group and McLaren, bringing together McLaren engineers and the Lego model production team from conception all the way to the final build.”