McLaren’s bargain-price Senna
McLaren has revealed a cut-price version of the Senna that costs 1/60,000th of the price of the original, writes Damien O’Carroll.
McLaren has made its most extreme road-legal track car available to anyone over seven – a move that could be considered irresponsible if it wasn’t made of Lego.
For a tiny fraction of the cost of a genuine McLaren Senna, a Speed Champions edition of the hypercar has been added to the Lego range, following in the tiny wheel tracks of the McLaren P1 and 720S.
The most ‘‘extreme track-focused road car built by McLaren’’ (that’s their words) has been brought down to size, with interlocking plastic bricks replacing carbon fibre and, while each full-size McLaren Senna takes close to 300 hours of hand assembly at the McLaren Production Centre in the United Kingdom, the lego version should be considerably quicker to put together, with just 219 pieces to assemble.
But the Lego Senna also comes with something that even buyers of the NZ$1.5 million real thing don’t get – its own wind tunnel.
McLaren says that for a car that can generate ‘‘an amazing
800kg of downforce at 155mph
(250kmh) it is just the thing for junior aerodynamicists to check out the Senna’s exceptional aerodynamic properties’’.
Except we doubt the chunky Lego version is quite as aerodynamic as the real thing...
The Lego Senna is finished in Victory Grey with contrasting orange highlights, comes with a set of interchangeable wheel rims, a removable windscreen and its own driver minifigure dressed in an official McLaren race suit.
The Speed Champion series retails in New Zealand for around $25 for the individual car sets, meaning you could buy roughly 60,000 Lego Sennas for the price of a real one.
If the real ones were still available, that is. The limited run of 500 sold out pretty much as soon as it was announced.
With the trio of McLarens, the Lego Speed Champion range has featured small, blocky versions of some pretty mouth-watering machines since it appeared in
2015, including hypercars like the Ferrari LaFerrari and Porsche
918, a range of F1 cars from Ferrari and McLaren, GT3 racers, muscle cars, the Ford F-150 Raptor, a Ford Fiesta WRC car, the Mini JCW Dakar buggy, LMP cars from Porsche and Audi and, most interestingly for Kiwi race/ Lego fans, the 1966 Le Manswinning Ford GT40 driven by Chris Amon and Bruce McLaren.
The McLaren P1, released as part of the original line up in 2015, is the best selling model in the range to date. Who wants to bet the Senna might just knock it off?