A team worked round the clock to build a 1:1 scale Lego Technic Peugeot 9×8 24H Le Mans Hybrid Hypercar in just 24 hours, to mark the 100th anniversary of Le Mans.
To mark the centenary of the iconic Le Mans 24-hour race, master Lego Technic builders and the elite hyper car design team from Peugeot Sport pulled off their biggest challenge to date – scaling up the Lego Technic Peugeot 9×8 24H Le Mans Hybrid Hypercar to 1:1 scale in just 24 hours, live at Le Mans.
The expert team of 12 designers, engineers and builders from the Lego Group built throughout the night, using a total of 626,392 Lego Technic elements and taking almost no pit stops in a true feat of endurance. The finished model – a scaled-up replica of the real-life Lego Technic model – features 623 different types of Lego Technic elements, weights over 900kg and is 520cm long, 220cm wide and 136cm high.
The race against time started on Sunday evening, when Le Mans official speaker Anthony Drevet kicked off the challenge at the Peugeot Sport stand in the Fan Village right next to the iconic Circuit de la Sarthe. Visitors got to experience the model being assembled live and on-site by the 12 Lego builders. Usually, large-scale Lego Technic builds of this size take teams of eight builders over five months to complete, but the team completed the build within the target 24 hours.
To make the build possible, the team developed a concept for ‘hyper elements’ – upscaled versions of regular Lego Technic elements made from hundreds of individual Lego pieces – that was used by master builders for the first time at Le Mans.
“Our designers are always ready for the next challenge, but building this iconic model for real certainly pushed their building expertise to the limit” said Joanna Katharina Lazar, vice president Global Product and Marketing Development at the Lego Group. “Watching their creativity as they tackled the pioneering build live at Le Mans next to the real model, and hearing the crowd cheering them, on was truly a once-in-a-lifetime moment. The challenge really shows that with Lego Technic and some imagination, you can build anything for real.”
Linda Jackson, CEO of Peugeot, added: “We have been working closely with Lego Technic on the Peugeot 9X8 and are so happy that it is now available for fans across the world to buy. This weekend, here at Le Mans, we saw the Lego Technic Peugeot 9X8 come to life in the same size as our race car. What a great idea, to challenge the team to do it within 24 hours. It was exciting to see the team rise to the challenge.”
Not far from the Peugeot stand, Le Mans visitors could visit the Lego shop or explore their love of motorsports at the Lego Group Experience Zone in the Fan Village. There, they could test their engineering prowess by building and racing their own Lego car, snap a shot against some amazing Lego displays built by local fans, and enter competitions to win Lego sets signed by Lego Designer, Aurélien Rouffiange.
