On the weekend of 10 and 11 June, the Le Mans circuit celebrated 100 years since its first year iconic 24-hour watches. And this time, the race was not only on the track, but also in the paddock – the Lego and Peugeot Sport companies celebrated their collaboration with a 24-hour non-stop construction of a 1:1 scale hypercar. But with that scale, it’s more complicated this time…
Lego has a rich history in building life-size cars. I will name only those from recent times, which are interesting from the Czech point of view because they were created in the Kladno factory:
These and many others have tried to imitate the real car as closely as possible, but the Lego racer built at Le Mans is actually an 11:1 scale model Lego Technic PEUGEOT 9×8 24H Le Mans Hybrid Hypercar (set 42156).
In Kladno, for this purpose, they developed the concept of the so-called hyper elements – these are enlarged versions of common Lego Technic elements, each of them built from hundreds of classic Lego Technic pieces.
The people from Kladno brought ready-made hyper elements to Le Mans, there were 720 of them, and all you had to do was follow the instructions. 12 designers, engineers and builders from the Lego Group participated in the construction.
It is interesting for us in the editorial office that one of the endurance builders was our ex-colleague Jan Posejpal, who for many years he sowed on MobilMania.
The race against time started at 7pm on Friday 9 June at the Peugeot Sport stand in the fan village next to the iconic Circuit de la Sarthe, and visitors had the opportunity to watch the model being assembled live. The work went on all night and in the end it turned out that 24 hours was a well-chosen limit – it was not without stress, but everything was done.
“For the first time, we decided to build a life-size LEGO car in 24 hours. LEGO Technic models of this size usually have around 8 modellers working on them, taking over 5 months to build after a few months of development. What we performed this weekend was really a race against time.” Lukáš Horák, Senior Project Manager from Model Production in Kladno, comments on the event.
The finished model is built from 623 different types of LEGO Technic bricks (a total of 626,392 pieces), weighs over 900 kg, is 520 cm long, 220 cm wide and 136 cm high.
2023-07-01 08:46:40
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