- Lego and F1 team up again, this time at the Silverstone GP
- This year, drivers will pilot 22 Lego karts on the track.
- The parade will take place on Sunday just before the official race
Lego and Formula 1 have teamed up again for a massive 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 revealed a roughly life-size car for each team, perfectly mimicking their real-life cars, except each had space for two drivers instead of one. They then all drove around the circuit, the cars being 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 go-karts, because that’s essentially what they are: they even have real go-kart wheels.
The big changes this year aside 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 25 km/h – and this year, Lego has accepted that drivers let their competitive side take over.
After attending the show in Miami, I couldn’t be more excited about this year’s Lego parade. The Lego karts look fantastic in real life – each one is outfitted in the team’s appropriate livery – but also delightfully cute, and while there’s a clear connection to the big builds we saw last year, it doesn’t feel like a simple repeat.
As Julia Goldin, Lego’s director of product and marketing, told me, this year’s goal was to: “Not only replicate, but build on what we did last year. We wanted to have something that would be visually stunning, that would be fun for all the drivers, and then also bring even more to the fans who loved watching the drivers unleash their playfulness in Miami.”
“A ride of chaos, childish joy and laughter”
Despite being specifically told not to participate in Miami’s Lego activations – at the risk of damaging cars and scattering broken Legos on the track ahead of the Miami GP – the most competitive men on the planet couldn’t resist attempting to outdo each other in their blocky cars.
Some even performed a few non-legal maneuvers, including taking shortcuts that they could only dream of using in a real GP.
This made the show even more hilarious to watch. Described by Lego as “a ride 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 Silverstone, the answer couldn’t have been better.
“It was great to see how the parade inspired people and really showed that there is so much creative potential in every Lego brick.”
Because even though it’s just one lap for the drivers, it represents 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 bit smaller, the vehicles presented 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 lead designer Jonathan Jurion.
“Also, rather than tailoring the components to the shape of the Lego like we did in Miami, we had to tailor the Lego around the shape of the components. At the same time, we wanted all the cars to have the team livery and be inspired by F1 cars.”
The end result of this balance are the cars we have in the Lego garage at Silverstone, and now all eyes are on Sunday for the unofficial race we’ve all been waiting for.
With Lego races becoming an annual tradition in F1, I asked the engineering team what the plans were for 2027.
Jurion told me the team was “100% focused” on Sunday, but was keen to maintain the partnership and continue to “surprise” fans with what the Lego brick can do, adding that “the sky’s the limit”.
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