Building a Lego Technic Bugatti Chiron: part three

Hello. Oik number two here. My estimable colleague, Oik number one Ollie Kew, stopped just shy of mating our Chiron’s front- and rear-ends. At least, he thought he did. Having transported the Chrion home with the kind of care I normally reserve for newborn children, it turns out there’s still quite a lot of work to do before the two ends meet – much of it quite fiddly.

Building a Lego Bugatti Chiron - part one

Building a Lego Bugatti Chiron - part two

First comes a bit of gearbox work. Ollie’s already built the gearbox itself (yes, it’s still a Lego model we’re talking about), but not the means to control it. So I start working on the centre console, which houses a little lever that controls forward/reverse and neutral. Once that’s done, it’s on to the paddle shifter – a little module that lives in the driver’s footwell that’s surprisingly easy to put together. It’s here I realise it would be fairly straightforward to convert the Chiron to right-hand drive. I resist the temptation and promise myself I’ll give it a go later. Mainly to prove to Ollie I'm better at Lego than him.

After a bit more building up – the beginnings of the roof and sidepods – it’s time for THE MARRIAGE. And I immediately run into a problem, because Oik number 1 has made a couple of errors that make joining the two pieces, on which the pair of us have slaved for hours if not days, impossible.

One block is causing trouble – so I remove it, officiate the marriage, and hope this deviation from the instruction bible(s) doesn’t cause me problems later on. That’s the problem with this kind of build – oftentimes you don’t realise you’ve made a mistake until much later. Luckily this one was easily mended.

Now, time for the retractable wing, which we can assure you is as complicated to build as it looks. And it proves to be my undoing, as you’ll read in our next update. There follows the rear haunches and the beginnings of the engine cover, which like all the other pieces, is built off the car then attached in one big lump.

Next, the interior…Stay tuned for the next episode of “TG Staffers Drive Themselves Slowly Mad”.