Being a long time F-1 fan, I’ve always wanted to build a giant Formula 1 car as a kid, but I never even started such a project (only some smaller cars, see my museum).

When Lego announced that they were going to release the 8458 „Silver Champion“ Formula 1 Car, my friend and I couldn’t hardly wait for the day this thing was hitting the shops. When the day had finally come, we both rushed out and bought a set each. But what a disappointment when the assembled model was standing in front of us.

O.K., it was really huge and the whole suspension part was great, but the car didn’t look the slightest like it was made out of Lego bricks. You couldn’t even see a single stud. All those flexible tubes and design elements really weren’t our thing, just like it was the case with the 8448 „Super Car MK II“.

Anyhow, my friend told me that I had to do something about it and redesign the car so that it looks like Lego again.
At that time I didn’t have any idea on how to achieve this, especially how to build the nose / front bodywork around the suspension, so the project was on hold for quite some time.

On the picture to the right you can see my friend and me admiring a huge Ferrari Formula 1 racecar model.
(Spanish Grand Prix, Barcelona, 2000)

I never would have thought that I would once own such a large scale F-1 replica myself.

But one evening when I came by to visit my friend, he had his Lego bricks all over his place and was tuning up one of his trucks. Among all those bricks were a lot of parts from a few 2556 Model Team sets.

At that time we both had 8 of this great sets each. I started to fiddle around with some of those bricks and started to build some of the bodywork. During my efforts my friend had already removed all the parts from his „Silver Champion“ that didn’t look like Lego, until the „naked“ chassis was left only.

When I attached some of the newly build bodywork to this chassis, I realized that a „classic Lego look“ Formula 1 racecar might eventually be possible after all.
And so I carried on with my work ...

I asked my friend to help me, but he only supported me by encouraging me to continue. By the end of the day, the whole bodywork was finished, only some minor rigidity issues had to be solved. But the big problem was that I didn’t build it with my own bricks and „surprisingly“ my friend wouldn’t let me keep the model.

Back at home the next day I opened another 2 of my 3 still sealed 2556 boxes and started to build the whole thing again, only this time with my own bricks. Not that I'm a huge Ferrari fan, but all those special bricks were only available to me in "red". If I could, I would have built the 1999 BAR car, the best looking F-1 racer of all time.