McLaren Senna the hefty king of the Lego hypercars

Wednesday, 27 March 2019

While a fast Nurburgring lap time has traditionally been the best way for a performance car manufacturer to go one-up on its rivals, it seems a new battleground is forming - who has the best Lego models.

Everyone from Ford to Ferrari have frantically been licensing designs to the Danish plastic block maker, either in its small, affordable Speed Champions series, or as larger and considerably more expensive Creator and Technics kits, but it is the one-off, full-size model race that the real competition is - and Mclaren are currently winning there.

While Bugatti fired the last shot with the 1:1 scale Lego Chiron from a while back that could actually be driven (albeit at only 20km/h), McLaren has just dropped a new full-size Lego replica of the spectacular Senna, and it is magnificent.

No, it's not a pixellated low-res picture of a McLaren Senna, it's just made of Lego.

Created in secret by shifts of specialist assemblers working around the clock, McLaren says the Lego Senna is made from almost half a million separate components, tipping the scales at 1700kg - or 500kg more than the actual McLaren Senna.

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The interior uses a real driver's seat, pedals and steering wheel from the actual Senna.

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Even the huge wing and complex diffuser were replicated in plastic blocks. That would have been a big job for someone.

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With 467,854 individual Lego elements used in its construction, the Senna used almost 200,000 more bricks than in the 720S model from two years ago.

It also took nine times longer than to build than it takes to produce each hand-assembled actual Senna, with teams of up to 10 model-makers working shifts around the clock needing 2,725 hours to click together all the pieces,

Including design and development, a total of 4,935 hours went into creating the model, involving no fewer than 42 men and women from the Lego build team.

While it isn't actually driveable like the Bugatti, you can still climb aboard, sit behind a real Mclaren steering wheel in a carbon fibre race seat from a Senna, push the start button and hear a 'simulation' (ie; a recording) of the Senna's V8 roar into life, as well as also operate the working lights and infotainment system.

This makes the Senna the first Lego McLaren to incorporate interior parts from a real car, including pedals, while on the outside McLaren badges are used and the wheels and Pirelli tyres are exactly as specified on the real car.

As expected, the car's 'brick-work' is finished to replicate McLaren's Victory Grey with contrasting orange highlights, just like the 15cm-long, 219-piece, McLaren Senna Lego Speed Champions edition that went on sale earlier this year.

McLaren said the Lego Senna will go on display at a variety of events throughout 2019, including the Goodwood Festival of Speed in Sussex, UK, in early July.