While Melburnian Oscar Piastri comfortably won the 2025 F1 Grand Prix in Miami, Florida this weekend, it wasn’t the Aussie's three first-place finishes in a row that took the news, but Lego.
The toy car company took the spotlight’s centre stage after unveiling full-size Lego replicas of the 10 F1 teams and their vehicles for the drivers' parade.
According to Formula 1, the project comprised 26 professional designers, engineers and Lego builders who spent over 22,000 hours at the toy company’s facility in Kladno, Czech Republic.
Each F1 car was “near 1:1 in scale” and is reportedly made up of 400,000 individual Lego bricks, with the total weight of each car reaching 1000kg.
While Lego is no stranger to recreating limited-edition cars, the project took it to another level, with the 10 replica vehicles featuring each of the team's sponsorships. But more importantly, the Lego brick cars are actually driveable.
The one-tonne Lego F1 car can reportedly reach 20km/h, and some of the drivers weren’t exempt from sharing their joy at driving a near full-size replica of their real-life vehicles as they drove through the Miami circuit during the drivers' parade.
Former seven-time world champion and Ferrari’s latest recruit, Lewis Hamilton, took to the social media platform TikTok to share his point of view during the drivers' parade.
Simply titled “Chaos”, Hamilton’s one-minute video depicts the British driver in the back of Ferrari’s Lego car while his teammate, Monaco-born Charles LeClerc, drove the pair across the Miami circuit.
Even though replica toy cars should be reserved for cautious driving, in the hands of F1 drivers, who carry a supreme level of competitiveness, it wasn’t long before they switched into race mode.
As seen in Hamilton’s TikTok video, the Mercedes-AMG replica vehicle driven by George Russell and Kimi Antonelli was caught sneaking up behind the Rosso Corsa before the French F1 team Alpine turned the light-hearted event into a semi-race.
Though avoiding contact with other teams is common race etiquette, the same can't be said for the drivers' parade, where Ferrari, Mercedes-AMG and Alpine were spotted racing each other, colliding on numerous occasions and sending Lego pieces through the air and the racetrack.
In a sport that thrives on driver and team rivalries each season, some F1 fans noted the change in the drivers' behaviour as they drove the toy replicas throughout the parade.
“This is the happiest I've seen them,” one TikTok user stated, while another said, “They're really just big kids out there”.
One commenter added, “This Lego car race is so funny, I'm crying. They should do this every race”.
While Lego and F1 have been collaborating on sets of all shapes and sizes over the years, Julia Goldin, the Chief Product and Marketing Officer of the Lego Group, said the latest project is a “true testament” to the brand's ability “to push the boundaries of what is possible”.
“We know that driveable big builds have an unparalleled ability to evoke excitement amongst fans and are delighted to see the reaction unveiling 10 at the same time has brought," she said in a media statement.
“We hope these unique creations reinforce that with imagination and a Lego brick in hand, creativity has limitless possibilities.”
Ethan Cardinal graduated with a Journalism degree in 2020 from La Trobe University and has been working in the fashion industry as a freelance writer prior to joining Drive in 2023. Ethan greatly enjoys investigating and reporting on the cross sections between automotive, lifestyle and culture. Ethan relishes the opportunity to explore how deep cars are intertwined within different industries and how they could affect both casual readers and car enthusiasts.
