The male figurines from 1990s LEGO Belville have built an escape! Housed in a world of pinks, purples and glitter, even a plethora of attractive female figurines couldn’t compensate for their inescapable male-toy need for guns, helicopters and black. How they’ve found the pieces to construct their escape we’ll never know, but their MH-6 Little Bird helicopter looks the shiznit! See more courtesy of Lennart C on Flickr.
Ergh, Star Wars… OK, here goes. This is Darth Vader’s TIE/x1 Advanced and… that’s all we’ve got. The proper Lego blogs will probably lose their shit over this build when they find it, so be sure to check them out for a better explanation. In the meantime you can see more of this thoroughly excellent (and commissioned) recreation of Darth Vader’s ride by Jerac at his photostream – Click here to use the force. Or something.
Contrary to popular belief Audi were not the first to bring all-wheel-drive to performance cars. However their ‘quattro’ system undoubtedly brought all-wheel-drive performance into the mainstream, and it changed rallying forever.
Launched in 1980 the Audi quattro brought several innovative new technologies into one glorious package, including all-wheel-drive, turbocharging, and a delightfully weird inline 5-cylinder engine. Audi entered their new car in the World Rally Championship’s Group B category, winning the championship in 1982 and 1984, plus the Pike’s Peak Hillclimb too.
By 1985 a variety of all-wheel-drive turbocharged rivals had caught – and then overtaken – the rally pioneer, beating Audi at their own game. This led Audi Sport to chop a chunk of length from the quattro’s wheelbase and up power to a very unofficial 500bhp+. The Sport quattro was born, a comedically ugly machine that was devastating effective. Best of all due to the FIA’s homologation rules a few hundred Sport quattros had to be produced for the road, meaning you could buy your very own World Rally Car for trips to Walmart.
Suggested by a reader we have both the rally and road versions of the Sport quattro in today’s post, each brilliantly built in Speed Champions scale by previous bloggee Marc ‘Edge’. There’s more to see of Marc’s rally and road Sport quattros on Flickr – click the links above to head to a gravelly forest circa-1985.
LEGO’s new Brickheadz sets have spawned an invasion of brick-headed cuteness, with fan-built characters popping up everywhere. Now they can pop up anytime too, thanks to this delightfully cutesy Brickheaded Delorean DMC-12 by Flickr’s jp_velociraptor in full Back to the Future spec!
Inside the flying time-machine are a Brickheadz Doc Brown and Marty McFly (of course!), and the model can transfer between flying and driving modes as per the movie car too. Click the link above to hit 88mph in the cutest way possible!
Nothing beats catching some ‘Z’s. Fortunately we can do just that thanks to Simon Prezepiorka and these three brilliant Datsun Fairlady/240Zs. Simon’s Speed Champions builds have become firm favourites here at TLCB Towers and you can check more of this trio as well as his past creations via the link to Flickr above.
You don’t need a million LEGO bricks to see your builds appear here at The Lego Car Blog. Jonathan Elliott has used just a few hundred (in one of LEGO’s fetching new hues) to construct this lovely Speed Champions scale classic Porsche 911 Targa. Jonathan has an impressive garage of similarly cool cars available to view and there’s more to see of them and the Porsche featured here at his Flickr photostream. Click the link above to make the jump.
Not to rub Jonathan Elliott’s nose in it, but 1971 was a long time before this TLCB writer was born. Nevertheless he’s still able to determine the make and model all four of Jonathan’s brilliant Speed Champions scale seventies supercars, so well do they recreate their real-world counterparts. See if you can guess all four and then head to Jonathan’s photostream to get your score!
Sorry, we mean Gee Bees. An important distinction that avoids you having to hear this. Founded in 1925, the Granville Brothers Aircraft company built just twenty-four aircraft until their bankruptcy eight years later, but they left one hell of mark. In the ground mostly, with a trail of fire behind it, but we’ll come on to that in a bit…
Designed primarily as sports cars for the sky, Granville Brothers’ aircraft excelled at air racing in the ’20s and ’30s, winning multiple trophy races and speed records. Known as ‘Gee Bees’ the outrageous designs looked like caricatures, with absurdly short fuselages, tiny control surfaces, and hot-rod-esque engines.
The superb Lego recreations of two of Granville Brothers’ designs pictured here come from Volker Brodkorb of Flickr, and whilst they may look like exaggerated cartoons, their real-life counterparts really did look like this. Well, until they enviably crashed of course…
The Gee Bee Model Z Super Sportster (above) was constructed in just five weeks in 1931, with the smallest possible airframe built around the largest possible engine. The Model Z’s enormous Pratt & Witney supercharged ‘Wasp’ radial engine gave it well over 500bhp, powering it to victory in every race it entered, despite it being ‘tricky’ to fly. Later that year Granville Brothers re-engineered the Model Z with an even bigger 750bhp Wasp Senior engine in at attempt at the Landplane Speed Record, when tragically a wing failure sent the aircraft spinning into the ground in a ball of flame, killing air-racer Lowell Bayles.
The next year Granville Brothers Aircraft built a successor to the destroyed Model Z, the R-1 Super Sportster (below). With a 25ft wingspan but just 17ft long, the R-1 was if anything even more dangerous to fly than the Model Z. Nevertheless the R-1 took victory in the Thompson Trophy in 1932 and the Landplane Speed Record the same year, before its inevitable fatal crash in 1933. Granville Brothers Aircraft re-built the wreck whereupon it crashed almost immediately.
Of the twenty-four aircraft built by Granville Brothers almost every single one was destroyed in a crash, with almost a dozen fatalities. By the mid-’30s the effects of the Great Depression – and a reputation as killers – meant that orders for new Super Sportster aircraft dried up, and the Granville Brothers Aircraft company filed for bankruptcy in 1934.
A few replica Gee Bees have been constructed since, however the Granville family have only shared the original designs with museums under the promise that the recreated aircraft will never be flown. Which is probably a good thing. Even so, we’ll stick with these fantastic and non-lethal Lego replicas. There’s more to see of each, plus Volker’s other planes, by clicking here.
We’re a bit nerdy here at The Lego Car Blog, so sometimes we like a good bridge. OK, we’ll show ourselves out, but before we go and have a quite word with ourselves if you suffer from this unfortunate disposition too you can check out of more of Tim Schwalfenberg‘s (brilliant) ‘River Crossing’ at the link.
Nope, not that Spanish exchange girl from your youth that you always wish you’d kept in touch with, but this rather neat steam corvette sailing under Chilean colours.
Built for the Chilean Navy by a British shipyard in the 1850s this Esmeralda is one of several Chilean warships to carry the name, and was sunk in the Battle of Iquique in Chile’s defeat to Peru and Bolivia in 1879. We know so little about about South American conflicts that our narrative ends there, but the model of the lost ship itself is nevertheless beautiful. Flickr’s Luis Peña is the builder behind it and there’s more to see of his gorgeous recreation of the Esmeralda via the link above.
The Elves are grumpy today. Grumpy because this find is one of yours, suggested via the Feedback page, and thus none of them are getting fed. Still, don’t let that put you off, if you have a suggestion check out our Submission Guidelines and if you think it passes drop us a note.
These two excellent brick-built bikes come from Lennart C of Flickr, who has used all manner of ingenious connections to build what is probably the hardest vehicle-type to create in small scale. On the left is superb and fiendishly complicated looking Harley Davidson Seventy-Two whilst on the right is beautifully sleek Honda CBR 1000 RR. See more of each via the links in the text.
White is strange automotive hue. Found on boring builders’ vans at one end of the spectrum and yet looking awesome on sports cars at the other. It’s the latter we have here for you today courtesy of Simon Przepiorka and his brilliant Speed Champions style Nissan 300ZX. So far dodging the ‘drift tax‘ the 300ZX makes a great classic Japanese buy at the moment too, especially in white. You can see more of this one on Flickr at the link above.
This amazing aircraft is a 1950s US Navy Douglas A-3B Skywarrior carrier-based nuclear bomber and its purpose was… well, chillingly obvious. Thankfully the Skywarrior’s nuclear bombs were never used in combat, as – perhaps worryingly – the US and the other nuclear-armed nations managed to shrink their nuclear bombs so that they no longer needed to be carried on bombers like the A-3B, but could fit on conventional fighter aircraft. Yay progress!
Such advancement saw the A-3Bs re-fitted as air-to-air refusing tankers to service those fighters, a role they fulfilled right up until the early 1990s, last seeing action in the first Gulf War of 1991.
This spectacular recreation of Douglas A-3B Skywarrior comes from plane building extraordinaire Ralph Savelsberg aka Mad Physicist who has recreated the historic bomber in glorious detail. With folding wing-tips for carrier storage, working landing gear, and an accompanying aircraft tug there’s lots more to see. Head over to Ralph’s photostream via the link above for all the images, plus you can read Ralph’s interview here at The Lego Car Blog as part of the Master MOCers Series by clicking here.
The Lego Car Blog Elves are being particularly annoying today, thanks to one of their number finding this. It’s a stunningly accurate replica of a Scania P410 Aerial Platform fire truck, and it’s beautifully detailed. Flickr’s Robson M built this Scania as a comission-piece and has used some excellent custom decals to further enhance his model’s realism.
You can see more of Robson’s Scania P410 at his photostream, where you can also see the model with the aerial platform in use and find a link to the real truck on which this creation is based. Head over via the link above, whilst we dig out Mr. Airhorn and put a stop to some considerable Elven ‘NEE-NAW’ing with warning siren of our own.
With nineteen overall wins (plus numerous class victories) Porsche have won the Le Mans 24 Hours more times than any other manufacturer. Over their 70 year history they’ve also raced in some wonderful liveries, advertising everything from fuel to cigarettes to alcohol – basically all the cool stuff.
To mark their 70th year Porsche will be fielding three of their iconic past liveries in the GTE Pro class at this year’s Le Mans 24 Hours race. Flickr’s Lasse Deleuran has recreated each in Lego form, applying them to his previous Porsche 911 RSR design, and they look incredible! Head over to Lasse’s photostream via the link above and pick your winner!
Drifting, as we learned earlier this week, has been around for some time. Today’s favoured drift weapons are 1990s Japanese cars, being relatively cheap (although the drift tax is now causing values to rocket), rear drive, and – most importantly in the modern drift scene – cool.
We’d prefer this though. It’s a glorious 1970s Datsun 240Z, one of the prettiest cars to come out of Japan, and one of the prettiest cars to come from the ’70s too. Flickr’s Simon Przepiorka is the builder as he’s fully driftized (what – it’s a word!) his 240Z with the addition of a wide-arch kit, what looks like a front-mounted intercooler, and an enormous rear wing.
Why drift cars need rear wings we don’t know, seeing as they’re going too slow to generate any downforce, they’re sideways so the air isn’t flowing it in a straight line, and surely downforce (and therefore grip) is the opposite of what helps cars to break traction anyway.
If you know drop us a note in comments, but we strongly suspect it’s to do with that ‘cool’ thing mentioned above. Anyway, Simon’s lovely Speed Campions scale be-winged Datsun 240Z can be found on Flickr – click the link above to get sideways.
Unlike today’s other wingsy post, the aero attached to this amazing-looking Audi quattro S1 E2 Pikes Peak is entirely functional. Built for conquering the formidable Pikes Peak mountain climb back when the surface was loose gravel, the Audi quattro S1 E2 needed as much downforce as it could get. Piloted by WRC legend Walter Röhrl, the S1 E2 reached the top of the mountain in less than eleven minutes, making it the first car ever to do so.
This wonderful replica of one of the most ridiculous racing cars ever built comes from Marc ‘Edge’ R.unde of Flickr, and he’s captured both the remarkable bodywork of the S1 E2 and the famous Audi Sport livery beautifully. See more at the link above.
The 24 Hours of Le Mans 2018 is nearly upon us! The world’s greatest endurance race is now in it’s 86th year, and in 2018 will feature sixty cars in four different classes, from the ultra-hi-tech LMP1 prototypes to the GTE Am class of supercars and gentleman drivers.
Somewhere in the middle sits GTE Pro, in which professional drivers for both works and independent teams will fight it out whilst dodging the ludicrously fast LMP1/2 cars hurtling past. This year six different manufacturers have qualified, and previous bloggee Lasse Deleuran has built all six beautifully in Lego form.
There are three Porsche 911 RSRs (featured here previously), two Ferrari 488 GTE EVOs, a Ford GT, a Chevrolet Corvette C7.R, plus the brand new Aston Martin Vantage AMR and BMW M8 GTE.
Each is a fantastic build utilising some ingenious techniques to capture both the complicated GTE-class aero and to accurately recreate the liveries of the teams. Head over to Flickr via the link above to see more of each build and choose your favourite!
The All Japan Sports Prototype Championship (JSPC) was one of the world’s wilder race series. Running from the early ’80s to the early ’90s it pitched various classes of endurance racers against one another on Japan’s fastest circuits. Porsche dominated the series, winning seven of the eleven Championships, with Nissan, Toyota and BMW taking the remaining four.
The Porsche 962 proved the car to beat, and yesterday’s Guest Blogger Prototyp has built three of the 962s that raced in the 1988 Fuji race. Each features the livery from a different team running the Porsche 962 in the late ’80s and there’s more to see of all three versions at Prototyp’s Porsche 962 Flickr album by clicking here.
Jonathan Elliott’s brilliant Porsche 911 design has appeared here before, but a shot showing it in three variants – including a gorgeous new Singer-esque commissioned piece – was too good to pass up! Plus today’s title gives us a tenuous link to this. See more on Flickr by clicking here.