This is Lego's life-size, record-breaking Koenigsegg Sadair's Spear

Side note: we’ve never seen the current crop of F1 drivers have so much fun. Yep, all built in Kladno. They’re literally building giant Lego models for a living. Around 1,500 per year right now. Might just leave my CV on the desk at reception. Having paid close attention to a safety video that we’re assured is just like The Lego Movie, photographer Olgun and I are each outfitted with a hi-vis and some extremely fetching steel toe-capped trainers. We all know that stepping on an errant brick is more painful than dental surgery, so I’m hardly complaining.

Photography: Olgun Kordal

The shop floor is a hive of activity, with a builder at each highly technical station and chimneys stretching down from the ceiling like industrial tendrils. They’re wicking away the fumes from all the glue that’s needed to stop little Jimmy pulling the head off an ornamental camel at Legoland Dubai. Although, that’s not to say that there are any giant camels in build here today. Or aren’t. In fact, just forget the camels altogether.

What I’m trying to say is we’ve signed a pretty strict NDA to be in here at all, and it means it’s eyes, and cameras, down as we make our way to an even more secret corner of the production line. Lego is now famous for its mega licensing deals, and a few of the partner brands that it’s working with wouldn’t want their wares shown off just yet.

If only my younger self could see me now, though. Legoland Windsor first opened a month and a day before I was born, and as a brick-obsessed kid it was heaven. Heck, I first learned to drive in the Lego City Driving School. While others were karting before they sat their SATs, I was spending birthday days out piloting a funny little box on wheels that’d max out at walking speed and taught me to give way to the right at roundabouts. Rounding a temporary wall of Technic-filled boxes, we spot what we’ve come to see. Looking rather menacing in the shadows of one of the loading bays is a black Koenigsegg Sadair’s Spear with orange accents that perfectly complement my beautifully bright safety gear. Only, there’s something different about this ’Segg.

You’ll have guessed what that is by now. This particular Sadair’s Spear is made almost entirely from Lego Technic elements. 327,906 of them to be precise. It’s the model building team’s latest in a growing garage of life-sized car builds, which kicked off with a drivable 1:1 scale Bugatti Chiron build back in 2018. That car featured over a million tiny elements, zero glue and 2,304 Lego Power Functions motors for a mighty total of 5.2bhp. Bugatti’s famously fast test driver Andy Wallace donned his fireproof pants and got behind the wheel, managing a massive top speed of 12mph at Ehra-Lessien.

The brief for the Koenigsegg, which was unveiled alongside a smaller scale, 4,104-piece Sadair’s Spear kit that you can actually buy for £399.99, was a little more ambitious. Not content with just being one of the pack, Christian von Koenigsegg wanted this to be the fastest full-size build yet. Of course he did. “This was the most complex build in the least amount of time of all the Lego Technic cars,” Lego’s design lead Lubor Zelinka tells TG. “The brief called for a Lego Technic vehicle that could go very fast, so we set a target of 100kph (62mph). 

We started talking about it last summer, but we didn’t really begin work until October. The whole project was seven and a half months. The other ask was to incorporate Koenigsegg’s famous Ghost Mode, so this is the first time we have had so many opening body panels on a full-size build. It’s not just a model anymore, it’s a vehicle.”

It’s not just a model anymore, it’s a vehicle

He’s not lying. Underneath is a bespoke metal chassis and an FIA-spec roll cage. There are proper Koenigsegg carbon wheels too, wrapped in Pirelli tyres, with actual suspension and motorsport grade disc brakes hiding behind the decorative Technic calipers. Sadly the Spear’s 1,603bhp 5.0-litre twin turbo V8 was judged to be a little excessive. Shame. Instead, there’s a small electric motor driving the rear wheels, so while it’s aiming to go quicker than the McLaren P1 build from 2024 (which Lando Norris piloted to a heady 31mph at Silverstone), it’s hardly an EV hypercar to rival the Rimac Nevera. Rather worryingly, it’s not even a full car when we arrive at the factory the day before its scheduled top speed run. 

A total of 18 model builders have worked on putting the car together so far in three separate shifts throughout day and night, but the mirrors are still on the work bench, the quick release version of the Sadair’s Spear steering wheel is nowhere to be seen, and half of the car’s ‘skin’ is still missing down one side. Things are a little frantic.

Of course, before those builders could take over the project, Zelinka and his team of designers had to work out how to transform a valuable engineering training tool (some might call it a kids’ toy) into one of the world’s most extreme hypercars. “We are model builders. We make things that are based in reality. So I look into what’s significant for the brand that we are working with. In the case of Koenigsegg, what I really like is how they use the family crest with pride on their vehicles,” explains Zelinka. “I’m looking for a way to break down the car body into smaller panels that can be built and repeated, because there’s no way we could place all the 327,000 elements one by one onto the car. We started with sketching and took the checkered pattern from the crest. We managed to create a skin from those diamond-shaped panels that is very durable but lightweight at the same time. It’s also interconnected so that we can make it into any sort of shape.”

Two of the model builders arrive with a pre-made panel and start slowly joining it to one of the dihedral synchro-helix doors. Apparently up to 50 per cent of the pieces in a standard Technic set are little connectors, and the choice of black bodywork with black connectors for the Koenigsegg made the job of the builders even trickier than usual. 

Mansory’s beloved chopped carbon fibre has nothing on this finish though. It’s hard to get your head around in the flesh. And if you’re thinking that Lubor has the greatest job ever, you might just be right. In over a decade with the company he has worked on all the full-size Technic cars and has built an encyclopaedic knowledge of Lego pieces in the process.

“I pretty much know the catalogue by heart at this point,” he explains when we quiz him on some of the more niche shapes on the Spear. “I’m a big Lego fan myself, so I also build in my free time. Whenever I encounter a new piece, I store it in my memory and think ‘this could be useful’. 

"We’ve used parts from all kinds of sets on the Koenigsegg. Parts of the front headlights are little canopies from Star Wars ships. The rear lights use house or train windows. The brake lights are emergency lights from police vehicles. We’ve used part of a wheelarch for a curved section of exhaust, and there’s another wheelarch from our C8 Corvette set on the brake calipers.”

Parts of the front headlights are little canopies from Star Wars ships

With Ghost Mode activated, the doors, bonnet and engine cover glide open gracefully and Zelinka gets to show off his team’s detailed replica of Koenigsegg’s Triplex suspension system. Turns out the gold cylinders used to mimic the Öhlins dampers are actually wheel rims from a Ninjago set, which is apt given his route into this role. “I always loved working on computers, but there’s also something artistic in me. So, I chose to go and study multimedia in college. I spent some time in the animation industry working on kids cartoons and commercials, and then I saw an ad for 3D modelling at Lego. I got hooked on the fact that it gets built physically. In movies you fake things and build for the camera, but here it has to work and from all angles. There’s also this engineering challenge. I thought I would try it for a year or two, but I never looked back. Time flies here.”

It certainly is for the builders as they scramble to get the car ready, although this team once built a life-size Technic Peugeot 9X8 hypercar at Le Mans within the 24 hours of the famous endurance race, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to hear that they stick on the last element in the nick of time. 

I’m even given the honour of popping the real life Koenigsegg shield into its new Technic housing on the bonnet, and the next day this 1,800kg plastic hypercar sets a blistering top speed of 111kph (69mph). Good grief. Just imagine being overtaken by one of these on the M6...