Honda heads to Bathurst. Just not how you're expecting.

Tuesday, 2 June 2020

Following a second season of the Lego Masters TV show Honda Australia has once again partnered with one of the judges on the successful show, Ryan ‘The Brickman’ McNaught, to create a new Honda-inspired model made of Lego for 2020.

Last year McNaught built a full-size model of a Civic Type R, but this year he says it is all about the detail in his recreation of an iconic figure from the Australian automotive landscape - the legendary Mount Panorama race circuit.

So what exactly is the Mount Panorama link with the Honda Civic Type R?

Honda has teamed up with Ryan 'The Brickman' McNaught to create a Lego version of Australia's most iconic race track.

Well that would be something that happened a little over a year ago when F1 World Champion Jenson Button set a benchmark lap time for a front-wheel drive production car around the famous Bathurst track as a part of his series of such records at iconic race tracks around the world in Honda's hot hatch.

**READ MORE:

An original Civic features in Lego form, as well as a Prelude, S2000, Integra and an original NSX.

* Five cool Lego-car brand collaborations

* This compilation of slow-motion car crashes is brutal

McNaught says the track took his team of eight people more than 650 hours to build.

* McLaren Senna the hefty king of the Lego hypercars

* How Lego Masters Australia helped make Hamish Blake a hit at home

Button's 2 minute 35 second lap may have set a benchmark for FWD production cars, but it wasn't his fastest time around the iconic Aussie track of course - he shattered the track record back in 2011 when he lapped it in his McLaren F1 car in 1 minute 48 seconds.

'Mount Hondarama' is 3.3 metres long and 1.8 metres wide, weighs approximately 210 kilograms and took a team of eight builders over 650 hours to construct, using more than 150,000 Lego bricks.

By way of comparison, last year's Civic Type R was transformed into a life-size Lego model using more than 320,000 bricks, taking1,300 hours to build.

“The biggest challenge for us this year is the fact that we’ve got lots of moving pieces,' said McNaught, who is one of only 14 Lego Certified Professionals in the world and the only one in the Southern Hemisphere.

'Moving parts are very challenging to do with Lego, let alone having cars actually racing around a Lego model.

“Our mantra is to grab people’s attention with something obvious and then hold their attention with lots of special details and fun things.”

Mount Hondarama includes a number of Honda’s current and historic cars transformed into Lego, as well as other products including motorcycles and power equipment. There is also a Honda dealership and service centre, a Formula One car and the HondaJet.

The track itself kind of cops out on the more intricate sections like The Dipper and Forest Elbow over the top of the mountain, and The Chase is seriously neutered, but given how difficult the Lego remote control Type R's seem to be to drive, that is probably for the best.