- Lego and F1 are teaming up again, this time at the Silverstone GP
- This year the drivers will ride 22 Lego go-go-karts around the track
- The parade will take place on Sunday right before the official race
Lego and Formula 1 have teamed up again for a big-build project — and I think I might be more excited for this year's parade than the actual Silverstone Grand Prix.
If you somehow missed it, last year at the 2025 Miami GP, Lego unveiled a roughly life-size car for each team — perfectly mimicking their actual cars, except each had seating space for two drivers instead of one. They then all took a lap of the circuit, with the cars powered by a small electric motor.
This year the cars are a little smaller, but the so-called minicars are each still assembled from more than 28,000 bricks. Think of them as go-karts because that's essentially what they are — they even have proper go-kart wheels.
The big changes this year aside from the smaller size: every driver has their own car, meaning there are 22 taking to the grid, and they have a higher top speed of 25km/h — and this year Lego has accepted that the drivers are going to let their competitive side take over.
After witnessing the spectacle in Miami I couldn’t be more excited for this year's Lego parade. The Lego go-karts look fantastic in person — each is outfitted with the team's proper livery — but also delightfully cute, and while there's a clear link to the big builds we saw last year, this doesn't feel like a simple repeat
As Julia Goldin, Lego's Chief Product & Marketing Officer, told me, the goal this year was to, “Not just replicate, but build on what we did last year. We wanted to have something that's going to be visually stunning, that will be fun for all the drivers, and then also to bring even more to the fans who loved to watch the drivers unleash their playfulness in Miami.”
“A lap of chaos, childlike joy, and laughter”
Despite being expressly told not to race in Miami's Lego activations — at risk of damaging the cars and spreading broken lego around the track ahead of the Miami GP — the most-competitive men on the planet couldn’t help but attempt to best each other in their blocky cars.
Some even did a few less-than-race-legal maneuvers, including taking shortcuts they could only dream of using in a real GP.
This made the spectacle all the more hilarious to watch. Described by Lego as “a lap of chaos, childlike joy, and laughter”, and it couldn't have more perfectly captured the emotions Lego hopes to inspire.
For the engineers behind the Miami build and now the Silverstone builds, the response couldn’t have been better.
“It was great to see how the parade inspired people, and really showed that there's so much potential for creativity in each Lego brick.”
Because while it's just one lap for the drivers it's 6,400 hours of designing and building for the 20-strong team who built all 22 cars. And despite this year's builds being a little smaller the vehicles had their own challenges.
“Last year we took the Lego Champions cars and scaled them up about 30 times. We had a really clear blueprint for the final builds. This year we had to start from scratch." says senior designer Jonathan Jurion.
“Also rather than fitting the components into the Lego build's shape like we did in Miami, we had to fit the Lego around the components’ shape. At the same time we wanted all the cars to have the team livery, and to feel inspired by the F1 cars.”
The end result of this balancing act are the cars we have in the Silverstone Lego Garage, and now all eyes are on Sunday for the unofficial race we're all waiting for.
With Lego races becoming a yearly tradition at F1, I asked the engineering team what the plans are for 2027.
Jurion told me the team is “100% focused” on Sunday, but the team are keen to keep the partnership going and to keep “surprising” fans with what the Lego brick can do, adding that “the sky's the limit.”
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