How to build a supercar, the Lego way...

Billund is Denmark’s second biggest airport, eclipsed only by the one that serves the capital, Copenhagen. This is entirely down to the presence of a certain toy manufacturer, Lego. This makes Billund the Maranello of the toy world, a place of pilgrimage for the faithful, and ensures that Lego, like Ferrari, is the engine of the town’s economy – a quadturbo, 16-cylinder, 16-litre engine at that.

But although there are Lego versions of various Ferraris, it’s actually a Porsche that’s brought us to this pleasantly unprepossessing corner of Scandinavia today. Last month, the company’s Technic line unveiled a magnificent and magnificently complicated iteration of the 911 GT3 RS, complete with functioning dual-shift gearbox, steering and engine. Almost as desirable – and in many ways as ingeniously engineered – as the real thing, this merited much closer investigation.

Photography: Tom Barnes

This feature was originally published in issue 285 of Top Gear magazine.

Lego, like many great brands, has had its ups and downs, most recently a worrying brush with the economic grim reaper in the early Noughties. Since 2005, though, the company has grown a whopping 18 per cent year-on-year every year, the latest figures showing a £1bn profit on a £4bn turnover, and still wholly owned by the family descended from founder Ole Kirk Christiansen. (Lego paterfamilias Kjeld Kirk Christiansen is a gigantic petrolhead, coincidentally.)

Shrewd licensing deals with entertainment behemoths like Star Wars, Harry Potter and current best-seller Frozen embolden the bottom line, but Lego, like the BBC, has kept the faith with a Reithian “inform, educate, entertain” mantra, winning over a new generation of kids whose brains haven’t yet been nuked by omnipresent games consoles. Available in 140 markets globally, this isn’t just one of the world’s biggest toymakers, it’s also one of the best-loved.

And not just by children. The 911 GT3 RS model costs £250 in the UK, yet it sold out on the first day. In-demand Lego products generate a quasi-religious fervour, and those amenable Danes can now pretty much pick and choose who they want to team up with. “We needed a partner that would work with us to create something really special,” Lego Technic senior design manager Andrew Woodman tells me. “We needed access to the people who designed the real thing, and access to the factory. Fortunately, there are lots of Lego nerds within Porsche.”

Negotiations began around three years ago, when Woodman and other members of the Technic team visited Weissach. Turns out that some of those Lego nerds included Porsche GT boss Andreas Preuninger and vice president of Motorsport, Dr Frank Walliser. No grubbing around in the lower reaches of the marketing department for these guys. In fact, Walliser even contributes a heartfelt piece to the monolithic instruction book that’s part of what is a sumptuously packaged affair. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a child he honed his formidable engineering skills using Lego Technic.

Creating a product on this scale is a stunning achievement. Lego insiders refer to individual pieces as “elements”, and there are no fewer than 2,704 in the Porsche. Given that there are 3,600 in the entire Lego arsenal (not including different colours – there are 60 of those), it’s clear how deep the design team had to dig on this one. But the real genius of this thing isn’t that it exists, it’s that only seven of those 2,704 elements are new, including the wheel rims, the brake calipers, the suspension components, and badges. The vast majority of the Lego GT3 RS is thus made up of pieces that are used in other Technic models, and right across the Lego “system” spectrum.

The designer responsible is a Dane called Uwe Wabra, and the longer I talk to him, the more it’s clear that the man – a former chef turned mechanic, with an early VW Beetle, Fiat 1100 and 1927 Chevy hot rod amongst others in his real-world garage – is a genius.

For one simple reason: as someone who regularly trips himself up while building Lego with the instructions, Uwe is voyaging into the unknown, effectively making it up as he goes along, using mostly pre-existing Lego elements to create, in this case, a functioning large-scale model of a Porsche. Then he revisits what he’s done, makes sure whatever methodology he’s used is repeatable, before running through the whole thing with Lego’s instruction builders. They, in turn, set to work drafting the manual, ensuring that these brilliant creations are as idiot-proof to build as it’s possible to be given the variations in IQ among the end users. Think about it in these terms, and it calls to mind the sequence in Ron Howard’s brilliant movie Apollo 13, where Nasa’s finest minds have to return Tom Hanks and team to Earth by rehabilitating their stricken module using bits of hose, sticky tape and toilet roll.

“That’s what we pride ourselves on: being able to do so much with as few new elements as possible. It’s the ultimate design challenge,” Woodman asserts. “Somebody gives you a set of restrictions and we have to be as creative as possible within those. We take what we have and begin experimenting, building up the basic parameters. Uwe starts by trying to understand where he wants to put stuff. He makes a map of where he wants things to be. Then he makes a structure holding those things where he thinks they should be. And if somebody says at some point, “This needs to be shorter,” he needs to go back and rethink how it all interrelates. It’s a massive game of 3D chess. You have to have some level of genius to visualise this stuff. It’s basically constant problem-solving.

I ask Uwe if he ever loses his temper. “Yes,” he replies. “Especially when you reach the point where getting one thing to work properly stops something else from doing so.”

This is Lego as a metaphor for life. “The designers might have to change what they think is a really awesome detail so that it can be repeated,” Woodman adds. “We don’t think of it as compromise, we prefer to say optimising. It’s fine-tuned to the point where you don’t even notice when you are putting one piece on top of another.”

Woodman reckons there were maybe 40 prototype versions of the 911 GT3 RS, the first done without access to data or images of the real thing. Before long, a secure server deep within Lego’s main infrastructure was set up, containing everything the guys needed to render the car in Lego. Only four of the 11 designers had access; security is paramount here. Woodman and Wabra shuttled to and fro between Billund and Weissach, carrying prototypes through curious airport security (“Lego designers spend a lot of time in the special room at airports, if they’re travelling with secret new models,” Woodman says mischievously).

The model was variously too long, the roof needed to be more curved, the proportions finessed, and Porsche even vetoed the inclusion of the GT3’s rearsteer that Uwe had managed to replicate. On the other hand, the team agreed to leave out the cooling fans, so that the model’s amazing working engine could be enjoyed properly. “It’s one of the important things we talk to our partners about: the abstraction level. Car designers talk in great detail, obsess over a beautiful curve they’ve created, then we show them something that’s a straight line and has holes in it. But this is a Lego Technic Porsche, not a model of a 911 GT3 RS. A certain leap of imagination is required.”