10 years of LEGO Speed Champions: an unpredictable theme with the drive to survive
LEGO Speed Champions turns 10 years old today, and to celebrate we’re piecing together the inside story of an unpredictable theme with the drive to not only survive, but thrive.
The very first LEGO Speed Champions sets raced on to shelves on March 1, 2015, with an initial launch wave comprised of seven products total: four standalone cars, an F1 pit stop, a race track finish line and an F1 truck. With cars measuring in at six studs wide and an assortment of play starters – tools, trophies, flags and so on – these sets are, in hindsight, closer to the current LEGO City line-up than modern-day Speed Champions.
That’s because this is a theme that has undergone changes both subtle and radical across its first decade, as we’ll come to see. But the launchpad for it back in 2015 was an ethos that’s still core to the theme today, even if that too has evolved over the years.
“There are a lot of car geeks working at LEGO, and there were lots of cars within various existing lines, but we thought that something was missing,” former LEGO Speed Champions design lead Craig Callum told Top Gear in 2017. “We wanted to create something authentic that would work for ‘older’ LEGO builders.”
While we’ve had to wait until March this year for LEGO Speed Champions’ first 18+ sets (and even then it’s only a result of specific brand sponsors for select Formula 1 cars), this is a theme that was always hoping to spread its wings beyond the LEGO Group’s core target audience. That didn’t mean exclusively catering to adults, though: kids were firmly in the mix too. Just older kids.
“The McLaren 720S consists entirely of pre-existing LEGO elements, although the wheel trims are specially designed,” Craig added, referencing the 161-piece June 2017 set 75886 McLaren 720S. “It’s not a diecast replica, it’s a LEGO version of the 720S. The proportions aren’t going to be exactly right, it’s a caricature to a certain extent, but the important thing is that kids are going to get it, and get into the whole idea.”
‘We know these models will be closely scrutinised’
The initial LEGO Speed Champions team consisted of just four designers, and though these cars were small, the lead time was just the same as most LEGO sets. Craig confirmed to Top Gear that it could take ‘up to two years to perfect the design and freeze it’. Part of that was (and still is) thanks to the team’s ambitions with these models, even at six studs wide – and an early recognition of the fact that adult fans were paying attention.
“The Ford GT40 is one of the most iconic race cars of all time, and the new Ford GT is just incredible,” Craig said in a press release for 75881 2016 Ford GT & 1966 Ford GT40 back in 2017. “Designed for children, but with grown-ups fans in mind too, we know these models will be closely scrutinised for authenticity.”
If those descriptions of the first wave of LEGO Speed Champions sets up top sound pretty foreign now, they should: today’s sets are far removed from the initial concepts underpinning this theme. The first few years of products placed a much greater focus on storytelling, in step with the wider LEGO portfolio, through the various ‘story starters’ included with each model.
Sometimes that was a wind turbine; others it was a pit stop or a starting line. Concepts were repeated and revisited in various ways, but the designers took every opportunity they could to innovate.
“We wanted to tell a different story with the 720S set,” Craig offered by way of example. “We’ve done racing, pit stops, cones, a chequered flag, and the Ferrari FXX K set even has a dyno and rolling road. But thinking about what it takes to get a car to that end point led back to the start of the process. So with the 720S set, you’re the designer, with the sketch and the desk.”
Quality over quantity
This initial approach was cemented relatively early on in the Speed Champions timeline, and continued in the same steady format for the first five years of the theme’s life. In that time the range encompassed manufacturers including Ferrari, McLaren, Porsche, Chevrolet, Ford, Audi, Mercedes, Bugatti, Dodge and Mini, gradually expanding its roster of available partners and building on the assortments within each of those partnerships.
What Speed Champions didn’t do was flood the market. Fewer than 10 sets arrived on shelves every year from 2015 to 2019, usually condensed into a single wave (with a couple of exceptions), in stark contrast to powerhouse LEGO themes like Star Wars, Marvel/DC, City, Friends and NINJAGO, which were busy pumping out dozens of sets per year. That focus on quality over quantity was likely a consequence of the relatively small design team, but the LEGO Group has never really talked openly about its strategic decisions around Speed Champions in the early days.
It’s an ethos that would continue into the next chapter of LEGO Speed Champions history, however, as the design team ripped up the rulebook for a decision that would have lasting and far-reaching consequences.
‘This is the first paragraph of chapter two’
Very few LEGO themes have hit the reset button quite as dramatically as Speed Champions. In 2020, the designers cleared the board entirely and made way for a new generation of sets, shifting the basic scale from six studs wide to eight studs wide. It felt revolutionary in the moment, and time has only intensified that feeling: which other theme can you point to that not only introduced a mid-life refresh, but also scrubbed compatibility with all previous sets?
That was effectively the endgame of this radical departure, which gave new fans the perfect excuse to jump on board – but left everyone else with a collection that could no longer be continued (at least through official sets). But Chris Stamp, who was LEGO Speed Champions Design Manager at the time and has since moved on to LEGO City, told Brick Fanatics in 2020 that the time was right to make a clean break.
“We just felt that five years is a nice round number,” he explained. “Let’s enter chapter two of Speed Champions and let’s do for LEGO cars what Star Wars did for LEGO Space, because if you look at the 20th anniversary boxes [in 2019] it is a perfect example. If you take Slave I or the Podracer and compare the original to the one we’ve done [for] the 20th anniversary, they are a million miles apart.
“This is very much the next step, it is that next massive leap. I class it as chapter two, because this has been chapter one and it has been gradually evolving and this is now the first paragraph of the next chapter.”
Scrapping the story
LEGO Speed Champions’ second chapter has now surpassed the length of its first, as we enter the sixth year of eight-studs-wide cars (starting with this month’s launch of an entire grid of Formula 1 cars). And short of an even more seismic shift to 10 studs wide, this seems to be the direction for the theme from here on in: but it’s one that’s defined by more than just the width of its cars, too.
“We also looked at things like why are people buying the products?” Chris explained in 2020. “The car is the hero for us. No-one is buying the Senna because of the wind turbine. Maybe one guy, but I wouldn’t put money on it. No-one is buying the fuel canister or little customisation details, so what you find is they are only buying it for the car. The car is our Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker, that is our character, so that is where we put the emphasis.”
That 2020 wave was the first time LEGO Speed Champions left behind what Chris calls ‘story starters’ for the vast majority of its sets, including every one of its single cars. Both double-packs that year included a starting line to encourage racing the two motors, but the line immediately de-emphasised anything beyond that. “No-one is buying it for the garage,” Chris added. “If they want a garage they will build it themselves, like a lot of AFOLs do, or you can buy that kind of stuff from LEGO City.”
The intention at the time was for the starting lines ‘with some sort of function for the lights’ to continue in subsequent waves, but even those were scrapped by 2021. Since then, LEGO Speed Champions has focused completely on its cars – even for this year’s Formula 1 range, where a start line might have made most sense to return. Responsibility for those elements has instead shifted entirely to City, as Chris predicted five years ago.
‘We don’t design our vehicles for kids’
That sea change came hand in hand with a wider recognition that the audience for LEGO Speed Champions was perhaps even older than the team had initially assumed all the way back in 2015.
“We don’t design our vehicles for kids,” Chris said conclusively in 2022. “The secret is, we design our vehicles for adults from a detail standpoint, because we know that our fans are kids, teenagers, adults, and car fans of any age. And if we design it for a kid, adults might not think it’s cool enough, or teens might think it’s kiddish, which was maybe our six-studs-wide approach.
“We aim for the adults because if it’s cool enough for an adult or teens, kids are going to think it’s amazing. The adults are the most critical, [who] we try the hardest to impress, and then it’ll hopefully be good enough for kids and teens as well.” That notion of bridging the gap between the two demographics by leaning into the older audience is ultimately what pulled the theme towards the bigger scale in the first place.
“One of the things we achieved very well with the six-wide is that it’s a toy,” Chris told New Elementary in 2020. “It isn’t a die-cast. It has a lot of charm. The good thing about the eight-wide is that it’s still a toy because kids can still pick it up; it’s not too big that they can’t play with it on the walls and the kitchen floor and the ceiling.
“But then when you’ve got them on your shelf and you collect them – and we know that kids collect these, they line them all up on their shelves – they’re a lot more presentable now because they’re even more authentic. That’s very important to us because some of these cars still have several stickers. We can’t avoid that: it’s race cars, the real things are covered in stickers. But by going up in size you create more space for yourself to use bricks instead of stickers to capture certain details. And that is where we are wanting to be.”
From diversity to homogeneity… or not?
In the years since that shift to eight-wide we’ve seen the stable of manufacturers under Speed Champions’ purview expand to encompass Lamborghini, Nissan, Jaguar, Koenigsegg, Toyota, Aston Martin, Lotus and Pagani – not to mention the laundry list of brands brought into the fold by Formula 1 this month. We’ve also continually seen the theme introduce polybags, break new records – reaching 10 sets in a single year in 2024 – and get increasingly experimental with its colour schemes and the types of cars it’s willing to recreate.
Last year was arguably the most diverse line-up we’ve ever seen from the theme, serving up a mix of concept cars, modern-day road cars, vintage models, Formula 1 racers and even a NASCAR-branded six-wide remake with the most unique Speed Champions livery to date. But in 2025, we’re seeing a hard pivot into Formula 1, with a wave of 10 cars recreating the entire starting grid of teams – a concept that as recently as 2022 Chris said would contradict the focus on variety that underpins the theme.
“Creating new car types and manufacturers helps with continued variety too,” he told Brickset. “I have seen demand for Formula 1 cars from different teams, for example, but that would mean prioritising the IP, rather than the building experience. We could produce Formula 1 cars in several different colours, but the only real variation between them would be the stickers. I think people would quickly become bored with them, though having an entire grid might be nice.”
We now have that entire grid – but as it turns out, there are actually more differences between the cars than just their colour schemes and stickers, as we’ve already explored in our reviews and comparison of all 10 sets, from 77242 Ferrari SF-24 to 77251 McLaren F1 Team MCL38. While there’s clearly a company-wide focus on Formula 1 in 2025, through themes including City, Technic and even Collectible Minifigures, what this latest shift demonstrates most of all is that nothing in Speed Champions is off the table.
The designers proved that back in 2020, and they’re proving it again in 2025. What will the next five or 10 years hold for LEGO Speed Champions? History tells us it’s almost impossible to say. But stick with us over the days and weeks to come as we dive deeper into this theme’s past, present and future: whether as driver or passenger, it’s a ride nobody should miss.
Bookmark our LEGO Speed Champions 10th anniversary page and check back frequently for new stories throughout March. The latest wave of LEGO Speed Champions Formula 1 sets is available now.
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