behind the scenes of mclaren x lego

Happy Sunday! We interrupt your regular Constellation Theory programming to bring you a career highlight: the launch of the LEGO® Technic™ McLaren P1™!

This was my main project when I worked a contract with LEGO last year, and I...was obsessed with it. Easily the coolest thing I’ve ever worked on as a strategist. No idea where I go from here. A dream!

I wouldn’t say I’m a supercar fan (I have no idea how cars work and, frankly, it’s none of my business) but I do appreciate really gorgeous ones. And the McLaren P1 is that girl—she’s one of three “hypercars” (one step above a supercar) in what car lovers refer to as the “Holy Trinity”: the McLaren P1, the Ferrari LaFerrari, and the Porsche 918 Spyder.

These are cars that have no equals; they are the apex of automotive engineering and style. All released in the same year, these cars “broke through so many technological milestones and proved that a super-high-performance supercar could actually exist that a new term had to be coined for them.” They all had ultra-lightweight bodies, hybrid engines, and blazingly fast accelerations (the P1’s top speed is 217 miles per hour).

But the P1 is in a class of its own. We wanted to convey how utterly iconic this car was: It is one-of-kind, light years ahead of anything else in the industry when it was released, and 11 years later, it’s still considered by the industry to be one of the most beautiful cars ever made. It’s also one of the fastest and lightest cars ever made—a marvel of engineering. Few people are lucky enough to spot one in the wild, because only 375 were ever made. One car expert described it as “a work of science fiction as much as vehicle manufacture.”

There’s so much that went into this build that the public will never know, so I’m sharing a little exclusive peek behind the curtain here just for you.

I interviewed the designer of the set, Kasper René Hansen, to get a better sense of how he approached this build—he’s a former industrial designer who last worked on the LEGO Technic Peugeot 9X8. The P1 was his first time working on a Technic Ultimate, and the biggest model he’d worked on.

In general, most LEGO sets try to reuse as many existing elements as possible (“The more elements that can be reused, the better,” he told me, for economical reasons)—for example, the little bonsai tree I have uses pink frogs as some of the cherry blossoms—but the P1 is unique and required 11 new elements, like rims and panels and curved shapes, the most out of any Technic Ultimate car before it. The P1 is an incredibly sleek-looking car, which was extra-challenging for the designers—the headlights, for example, are supposed to mimic the shape of the McLaren logo, and the 5-point “butterfly doors” were more complicated than any car LEGO had ever made before (most doors just move at one point). Unlike other LEGO sets, which use stickers, the McLaren logo will be directly stamped on all of the elements. “The elements are more challenging, shape-wise,” he said. “We took learning from the last Ultimates and added more. But the rims are unique to this model, and will not be reused.”

The “last Ultimates” he’s referring to are the others in the LEGO Technic Ultimate Car Concept series—the P1 is only the fifth one ever made, after the Porsche 911 in 2016, the Bugatti Chiron in 2018, the Lamborghini Sián in 2020, and the Ferrari Daytona in 2022. Each one is a perfect 1:8 scale model of the original car.

And for those unfamiliar with LEGO Technic...it was really the only vertical of LEGO’s that had a chance of replicating the P1. LEGO Technic is the opposite of the relaxing pastime sold to you by LEGO Botanicals (the flower sets) or LEGO City (the landmarks series). LEGO Technic is hard. The builds are much more intricate than regular ones—a lot of the pieces move and interlock, so every piece matters and the order in which you place the pieces matters. These are not builds you complete while watching TV in the background; they’re builds you complete with headphones on, head down, intensely focused. Most normal LEGO builds take a handful of hours, but LEGO Technic Ultimates (which are the hardest of the LEGO Technic builds) take around 17-18 minimum, even for experienced builders.

I built the Lamborghini Huracán, which is not an Ultimate, and I think it took me ~7 hours (I’m pretty quick for someone who doesn’t build a lot, and finished the floral sets in like two hours). The labor of the building process is a point of pride for serious fans (AFOLs or “Adult Fans of LEGO”), who often have whole rooms in their houses for displaying them.

They also make the Technic Ultimate sets worth the $450 price point—opening it is meant to be a whole experience, and the box and building manual are meant to be keepsakes. Like the real P1, each building kit features a unique serial number, which unlocks exclusive online content.

While I was at LEGO, I worked Danish hours, or what I affectionately referred to as “vampire hours.” Because I was still in New York, I would wake up at 5 or 6 pm, eat dinner, go do whatever if I had plans with friends, and then start work at 3 am and finish at 10 am. I did this for six months. And I would 100% not have done it for any other company. Totally worth destroying my circadian rhythm for a little bit.

There’s a reason people stay with LEGO so long or commute an hour or more just to work there. They truly do care about their people and they take work-life balance seriously (many of my meetings were pushed simply because everyone was taking vacation...if there’s one thing I learned from LEGO it’s that most business deadlines are very arbitrary and artificially urgent!), which is why as an ex-employee I’m still their biggest fangirl. If you ever get the chance to work with LEGO, do it! It may be the best thing you ever do.

💖 jenny

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