The mad 46-litre Brutus could soon be yours… in Lego form

Remember the Brutus? In case you've forgotten, it’s a 2.5-tonne, 46-litre BMW V12-powered leviathan that’s longer than your average runway. Fitting, since the frankly ridiculous water-cooled engine was lifted directly from a pre-war aircraft and placed atop a chassis from the now-defunct American LaFrance.

But while the Brutus itself was a study on what a deranged engineer could build when left alone in a shed for a few months, it was rather short on production. Canadian-Polish engineer Jan Guerquin has made it much more accessible to the masses by simmering it down into Lego-fied form. Why, of all things, has he chosen the Brutus?

“I love the craziness of it," he told TG. "Chain drive, aeroplane engine, master-slave connecting rods, exposed valve train, the list goes on. It is so mechanical, and completely opposite to all the cars we’re used to seeing now.”

Or ever, really. This is a 1:10 scale of the ginormous original car, meaning it should comfortably measure up just shy of, say, an airliner. You’ve got 1,100 building blocks in total, and nearly half of those alone are used to assemble the engine. He said the engine was in fact one of the biggest challenges he had to overcome, as was the chassis integration.

To make the trickier bits like the leaf springs for the suspension and chain-drive links to the rear wheels, Guerquin used flexible blocks to keep the Brutus as lifelike as possible. He even threw in a sequential transmission and corresponding ratchet mechanism for good measure.

“As a lifelong Lego builder and mechanical engineer, a key characteristic for me was for it to be fully functioning.”

For those of you raising an eyebrow in interest, the Brutus has been pitched to Lego ideas and is currently awaiting approval. Should it make production in the future, it would make one hell of a Christmas present.

Guerquin has mentioned that he came up with the idea during the Coronavirus pandemic, which confirms that an engineer left alone in a shed for long enough will indeed create something deranged.