It’s Novvember, the annual building bandwagon about which TLCB Staff know as much as Kim Kardashian does particle physics. Cue this splendid ‘Viv Viper’ entry by The One and Only Mr.R inspired by the ’80s video game ‘Gradius’, about which we also know nothing. Which makes this a short post. But fear not, we’ll be back with a weird car imminently, and until then take a closer look at this superbly presented starfighter on Flickr via the link.
This incredible creation is the Seaspan Canadian Polar Icebreaker, a 150,000-piece commission for Canada’s new $multi-billion icebreaker programme currently under construction in Vancouver.
Created by Paul Hetherington (aka Brickbaron) and certified LEGO Professional Robin Sather, this enormous brick-built colossus replicates the real Seaspan Canadian Icebreaker due to go into operation from 2030.
Measuring 2ft wide and 11ft long, and taking 520 hours to construct alone (not including design and planning), Paul and Robin’s creation recreates every detail of the real ship in mini-figure form, including the bridge, heli-deck, lifeboats, engine room, cabins and more, with Seaspan’s engineers themselves part of the design process.
Split into six sections, Paul and Robin’s astounding creation not only mirrors the design of the real ship, but also reflects its crucial job, with the model set amongst the ice and sea floor in which it will operate – with the brick-built ice doubling as support for the model’s cutaway design.
Now on display at Seaspan’s headquarters in North Vancouver, there’s lots (and lots) more to see of this spectacular ship at Paul’s photostream, where nearly twenty images of the build are available to view. Click the link above to head to Canada’s polar waters in a truly magnificent brick-built boat.
We’ve having a tug today, courtesy of regular bloggee Thirdwigg and this neat all-mechanical harbour tug boat. Rarely built in Technic form, Thirdwigg’s ship features ‘HOG’ steering and twin winch control via the cogs atop the pilot-house, and he’s released free building instructions too. Give your self a tug at both Flickr and Eurobricks, where full details and the instructional link can be found.
We’re sure that many of our readers are familiar with today’s car. And not just because we’re big in the criminal underworld. The Ford Crown Victoria was a car sold almost entirely to two very specific customer types; cabs and cops, with millions of Americans having sat willingly or unwillingly in the back seat. This one is likely to have a less-than-willing occupant in the back, and you can take a look courtesy of ilyabuilder724 on Flickr.
Flickr’s Szunyogh Balazs has appeared on these pages several times before, with vehicles that are fast, loud, or both. But not today, because his latest creation is at the opposite end of the vehicular spectrum. This is the communist East German Trabant, a car made fro cardboard for people that had no choice.
Almost three million Trabant 601s were made, making it the East German equivalent of the West German Beetle. Although the Beetle became a Polo. And a Golf. Whereas the Trabant carried on until the collapse of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany in 1991. There’s more to see of Szunyough’s splendid Lego Trabant 601 on Flickr, and you can head to the other side of the iron curtain via the link above.
Alternatively titled “LEGO go racing!”. Alternatively alternatively titled “Women in the workplace“. Yes, this is the brand new LEGO 77258 Speed Champions F1 Academy Car, and it replicates LEGO’s entry of a real car in the F1 Academy 2026 Season! Which is just like F1. Only worse. And just as gender uniform.
However, the F1 Academy’s lack of gender diversity is because it’s nearly 2026 and there are no women drivers in Formula 1, and nor have there been for forty years.
Cue Formula 1’s investment in the F1 Academy, a spec-series championship for female drivers only, on par with Formula 4, into which LEGO will enter under the banner ‘LEGO Racing’ with Dutch driver Esmee Kosterman.
Wearing a LEGO Friends-esque livery, the new LEGO Racing F1 Academy car aims to inspire a new generation of girls to get into motorsport, and brings a new Speed Champions set into the range to boot.
With new wheels and tyres, a funky new mini-figure crash helmet and steering yolk, plus stickers replicating Esme’s real 2026 LEGO Racing F1 Academy car, we think 77258 is a fantastic addition to the Speed Champions line-up, with a thoroughly decent message behind it too.
You’ll be able to get your hands on the new 201-piece F1 Academy Car for $28 / £22 when the 2026 F1 Academy season begins in March, around the same time the sexist pigs in Formula 1 begin their own 2026 campaign.
Is your new Ford Bronco too big to get to the really cool off-road places? Then you need to switch it for an ATV, thanks to TLCB Master MOCer thirdwigg!
Constructed only from the parts of the official LEGO Technic 42213 Ford Bronco set, thirdwigg’s ATV (or ‘quad bike’ in TLCB’s home nation) alternate features working steering, pendular suspension front and rear, plus a W6 piston engine, and with building instructions available you can create it for yourself too.
There’s more to see including that link to instructions at thirdwigg’s ‘42213 ATV’ album, and you can jump to a trail somewhere cool via the link above, or alternatively click here if you want to downsize your Bronco, but not quite this much…
It’s that time of year again, when a crack team of Elven ‘Volunteers’ are fired over The LEGO Company’s perimeter wall by way of the office catapult, tasked with uncovering the newest LEGO sets due to hit shelves next year.
We’ll report their finds for 2026 in the coming weeks, but we have one 2026 Technic set to share ahead of the main event today. This is the brand new LEGO Technic 42223 1966 Ford GT40 MKII Race Car!
Bringing one of America’s* greatest ever race cars into the Technic line-up, 42223 recreates the car that finished 1, 2, 3 at the 1966 Daytona 24 Hours, Sebring 12 Hours, and Le Mans 24 Hours sixty years ago, becoming an all-time legend in the process.
The new LEGO Technic 42223 Ford GT40 captures the exterior of the all-conquering ’66 MkII variant with a range of pieces appearing in new colours – including those gold wheels – plus an array of decently-authentic looking decals adding the side and centre stripes, roundels and seat details.
793 parts make up the new 42223 GT40 in all, with the set featuring the default working engine (a miniaturised V8), working steering, and the opening doors and engine cover expected as a minimum at this scale, and no more.
Except 42223 does have one unexpected variance from the mid-size Technic vehicles that have preceded it… An 18+ age and £65 / $75 price tag.
No, that isn’t a typo. Despite being constructed from under 800 pieces, and with no more working features than any other mid-size Technic vehicle, LEGO have somehow determined that 42223 requires a brain eighteen years or older to complete it, and thus it carries a price to match.
Which is – and there’s no other way to put this – a marketing scam.
We’re admittedly idiots here at The Lego Car Blog, but we don’t like LEGO treating its customers as such. The brand new 42223 Ford GT40 MkII Race Car might bring one of greatest cars of the 1960s to the Technic range, but the cynical, unscrupulous, and exploitative marketing that accompanies it is definitely from 2026.
At £55 / $65 and an age of 12+, 42223 could have been a strong set. As it is, this GT40 should have stayed in ‘66.
*Except it was British. Ford are no strangers to marketing scams either…
Seagulls are roundly disliked in TLCB’s home nation. Found on rubbish dumps or in British seaside resorts (which amount to the same thing), they make irritating ‘CAAAW!’ noises, crap all over the place, and mug people for their chips. However in car form, they’re rather wonderful…
This is the mid-’50s Mercedes-Benz 300SL ‘Gullwing’, perhaps the only time a coupe has been more desirable than the roadster, thanks entirely to those magnificent doors.
This splendid Speed Champions version, complete with the aforementioned gullwing doors, comes from previous bloggee SFH_Bricks, and with building instructions available you can recreate it for yourself. There’s more to see at SFH’s ‘1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL’ album and you can CAAAW, crap all over the place, and steal someone’s chips via the link above.
This is a Honda’s B-Series engine, as used in numerous Civics, Preludes and Accords in the late-’80s to late-’90s, and the genesis of VTEC. Available from 1.6 to 2.0 litres in capacity, the B-Series could rev to over 8,000rpm, and became one of Honda’s defining accomplishments.
An engineering masterpiece, Honda’s B-Series has featured in quite a few Lego Hondas over the years. Except of course, it hasn’t. Not really. But today we really do have a Lego Honda B-Series, because this amazing creation is a fully working replica of the B16.
Complete with brick-built pistons, crank, manifold, wastegate and ancillaries, this remarkable build captures every aspect of the real Honda engine inside and out, and – purely because it’s cool – in the version we’ve pictured above builder Delton Adams has added a motorised turbocharger for added ‘phish – whuudududu!’ noise imaginings.
As wonderful as it is unusual, there’s a whole lot more of Delton’s incredible Honda B16 to see – both in original and turbo-modded forms – at his Flickr album of the same name. Reliably rev your way to 8,400rpm* via the link in the text above.
*Unless you’ve added turbocharger for ‘phish – whuudududu!’ noises of course.
The eagerly awaited final season of ‘Stranger Things’ is just a few days away, when we – along with millions of others – will return to 1980s Hawkins Indiana for one last time.
Hawkins’ news outlets are likely to be very busy, with ‘94.5 The Squawk’s news van ready to cover the mysterious disasters courtesy of Alex Jones (aka Orion Pax), who has recreated it and its ‘Upside-down’ counterpart brilliantly in brick.
Opening doors, a fully-fitted interior, a removable roof, and an accurate ‘94.5 WSQK’ livery all feature, and you can join us in Hawkins at Alex’s photostream via the link above.
This strange looking creation is the product of no fewer than seven builders. Published by Flickr’s [Intense Potato], the ‘Beluga Gunship’ was formed via a digital file being passed from one builder to the next after 48 hours, with each adding what they liked to the design in their allotted time. Which means that this creation may have started life as a 1982 Morris Ital, an 18th century battleship, or a small dog, but whatever its beginning it’s turned out rather well. You can see more of this virtual oddity, and discover the chain of builders that formed it, at Potato’s photostream. Click the link above to pull the chain.
It’s fight night! And we have two long-time adversaries (and previously allies) in the diesel locomotive category. Starting in the yellow corner, from America, it’s the EMD GP 38-2! Aaaand in the black corner, from Russia, it’s the TEM-18DM!
Each is pulling the finest hardware from their respective militaries, and you can place your bets courtesy of TLCB debutant Konstantin on Flickr via the link! Let’s get ready to railrooooad!
Things have been quiet here at TLCB Towers. Days have passed without us publishing anything, during which time the only sound in the office was the soft clicking together of bricks. And that’s because our friends at No Starch Press sent us a copy of their new book to review, and it’s a belter! This is The Great LEGO Puzzle Book by Jacob Berg.
An ingenious idea (that we’re amazed hasn’t surfaced until now), The Great LEGO Puzzle Book takes a handful of the most basic pieces that all LEGO fans are likely to own, and uses them to create over a hundred building puzzles.
Jacob begins The Great LEGO Puzzle Book with ‘2D to 3D’, with the challenge being to turn an image of pieces in profile into a real-life 3D stack. The challenges progress with increasing difficulty before moving on to more complex variations via ‘Complete the Cube’, ‘Master the Shadows’, ‘Third Shape Missing’, and lastly – our favourite – ‘Fill It!’, which is kinda like a brick-based version of that wild Japanese game show.
Each of the aforementioned chapters contains dozens of puzzles, solvable using the same basic LEGO pieces, and is seriously addictive. It’s also seriously accessible, and a great game to play with kids that teaches both building and orientation skills, with all of the solutions detailed in the book’s final chapter and a few hints given along the way.
Our copy of The Great LEGO Puzzle Book was in digital form, which was clear and easy to read, and with several physical copies of No Starch’s past titles on shelves here in the office we’re confident the printed version will be up to their usual high standard.
The Great LEGO Puzzle Book is rather unique (and captivating) addition the No Starch’s expansive LEGO book catalegue, deploying our favourite little plastic bricks to a whole new purpose. If you like sudoku, crosswords, brain puzzles, or Rubik’s Cubes (or you know someone that is), we can thoroughly recommended it
On sale in the No Starch Press store, The Great LEGO Puzzle Book is available now at $17 for printed and $14 for eBook versions, which is a bargain to keep yourself (or a partner, friend, or your children) wholesomely amused for hours.
Neither of today’s posts are cars, because… shut up, that’s why. We like trains. This is one is a Spanish Renfe S-251, designed and built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and it comes from Flickr’s Ferro-Friki who has captured the 1980s electric locomotive superbly in brick form. There’s more of the model to see at Ferro’s ‘LEGO Renfe S-251’ album and you can buy your ticket at the link above.
*Today’s title song. We’re nothing if not diverse.