If you’ve got a spare £389.99 lying around, you can pick up the one-eighth scale Lego Technic McLaren P1. Made up of nearly 3900 pieces, it’s a mightily intricate bit of kit and would make a nice addition to any shelf/desk/kitchen table, much to the chagrin of the rest of your family.
What you can’t buy for any amount of money, though, is this: it’s a one-to-one scale replica of the P1 made up of literally hundreds and thousands of Lego Technic pieces. And while full-size Lego replicas of cars are nothing new, this one’s a bit different – because it drives.
With input from 23 design, engineering and construction specialists, this leviathan project took 8,344 hours to complete – that, if you don’t have your calculator app handy and you’re not some kind of mathematical prodigy, is over 347 days. Almost an entire year, then.
It’s made up of 342,817 individual Lego Technic elements. We can’t even imagine what that much Lego looks like in one place, except we can because here it is in the shape of a McLaren P1. There are 393 individual kinds of Lego pieces in there, too – again, did you even know there were that many? All in, it weighs 1220kg – 270kg less than the kerbweight of a real P1.
Much like the real P1, it features an electrified powertrain. There’s no twin-turbo V8 involved here, though – that probably wouldn’t be wise in something made of actual Lego. Instead, its power comes from a combination of Lego Technic function batteries and an unspecified electric car battery, which powers a single electric motor.
McLaren doesn’t provide performance figures, but safe to say they’re probably a way off the real P1’s 2.8-second 0-62mph sprint and 217mph top speed.
That said, when McLaren F1 driver Lando Norris took it out for a lap around Silverstone, it didn’t particularly look like it was hanging around (although we suspect there might be some sped-up footage involved). We can only hope for his sake that he wasn’t driving barefoot.