Two years ago, Lego and F1 shook hands on what looked like a fairly standard licensing deal. Having covered most of this from the inside, I thought it was worth pulling the whole story together – here’s how Lego and F1 became the perfect pit-lane partnership. For F1, Lego offers something the sport has always found tricky: a way to make a fairly serious, grown-up sport feel playful and accessible to children without diluting the racing itself. Twenty-six designers and engineers had spent close to a year building ten fully drivable, 5.5-metre Lego F1 cars – one per team, each around 400,000 bricks and 1500kg, with real F1 rims and tyres bolted onto a custom Lego frame. It was a genuine widening of what the partnership was for – not just merchandise inspired by F1, but F1 built, in part, by Lego.