It has been a long while since I indulged my inner child with a new LEGO set, so I decided this Speed Champions Porsche 911 Turbo needed to be bought and built. The car is an icon of automotive design, and this set looks like it might do a good job replicating it via interlocking plastic bricks.
The back of the box has glamour shots of the model. All the bits are bagged in three clear pouches, but without any discernible rhyme or reason, since they all need to be opened just to build the driver. There is also a sticker sheet to add extra detail, and the usual full-color instruction manual.
We start with the minifigure. It's like my plastic doppelganger! Maybe I should see a doctor about my jaundiced complexion one of these days...
I'm not sure what I think of these cylindrical bricks with axle holes. Why not a classic 1x2 brick with a hole? I suppose the designers weighed all the possible options to determine the best fit for everything, and this must have been their conclusion, but I'd like some insight behind the process.
The directions are extremely simple. I think the kits from my childhood had fewer steps with more parts per step, and no little guide telling me what parts I needed. We were tough back then, and blundered through as best we could without such mollycoddling! [/geezer rant]
It's nice to see one classic 2x4 brick play a role in this fancy newfangled set though.
Here's how they replicated those classic Porsche 911 headlights. Neat!
And here's the finished product! I haven't added the stickers yet, because there is a side of me that wants to buy a second model and make a wider two-seater. But the stickers wouldn't interfere with disassembly. There were also a lot of little extra pieces.
After dabbling in a lot of Dollar Tree knockoffs, it was nice to handle the real thing again. LEGO is truly an amazing product. The precision of the parts and innovation in the design are remarkable. And last but not least, this car just begs to be rolled around whilst making Vroom! Vroom noises.
Which I most certainly did not do.
The Speed Champion set are always good value. Of course there is the Lego creator version of the porsche which I'm considering buying. I've also recently built a porsche 911 from a design on rebrickable which I must write about.
And yeah the instructions were way harder back in the day.
And actually this is the car that killed Paul Walker from The fast and the furious he had an extremely tricked out one and led a novice driver wreck it and crash. Apparently from the autopsy Paul had regained consciousness in the car as it was on fire....
Absolutely amazing vehicle but squirrely as hell
Yeah... those older Porsche Turbos were notoriously squirrely, and that laggy turbo boost could probably throw you for a loop even without nodding it out the wazoo.
EDIT: It looks like Paul Walker had a car 30 years newer than the one this replicates. New Porsches are acclaimed for their handling. That crash is most likely on him.
The crash is on the driver that Paul allowed to even drive it because not only was it extremely souped up and had way too much horsepower for the amount of tires that it had.
Either way I would still love to own and drive one of these myself
Yes, the precisions and consistency of the plastic used by Lego is truly nice.
You would think with CNC milling machines and dozens of years of plastics progress that the dollar store stuff would be just as good... but it's not.
I'm surprised you actually bought Lego for once.
Buying crypto: broke
Buying LEGO: woke
I think I have posted a few LEGO set reviews over the years. I just found it more fun to try the garbage imitators, too.
Treating your inner child, you naughty boy? Sorry, but I couldn't resist teasing you because I recently did something quite similar. I buy lots of odds and ends from Luddites, Inc., and they recently added some models from the Atlas Ultimate Tank collection...
...so, for an extra $30, I treated myself to a 1:72 scale IS-2! Not Lego, but a cool toy all the same. Maybe I'll show it off when it gets delivered.
Of course not, that would be childish XD
sounds like fun XD
Maybe you're older than me or have built more kits (I didn't have a lot of kits, mostly just a lot of bricks), I do remember some instruction books having a lot of parts in one step and they could be horribly confusing if you weren't sure what bricks were at the back. The oversimplified ones that were almost one brick at a time were on the one hand slightly more frustrating but on the other hand at least it was easy to backtrack if you stuffed something up XD
I bet you have a young relative who would be happy to provide the vroom vroom noises for you.