How to adapt LEGO City’s Formula 1 Garage for Speed Champions cars

LEGO City’s Formula 1 range isn’t to scale with Speed Champions cars out of the box – but here’s how you can double up the garage to fit eight-wide F1 racers.

The jump between LEGO City and LEGO Speed Champions cars is pronounced, going from fairly generic race cars in the former to impressively detailed and personalised models in the latter. While the LEGO City theme boasts Formula 1-branded accessories and elements from the world of motor racing, it’s LEGO Speed Champions that can claim more accuracy on the build of the cars themselves.

But in the immortal words of the little girl from the Old El Paso ad… why not both? I decided to take matters into my own hands and combine the strengths of both F1 ranges, adapting two copies of 60444 F1 Garage & Mercedes-AMG & Alpine Cars to fit a LEGO Speed Champions car. With the Speed Champions vehicles being almost twice the size of a City one, there would only be room for one car, rather than the two in the official version.

My goals with this build were not just to physically fit a Speed Champions car into the build, but also to recreate the ‘kick’ function that sends the LEGO car out of the garage as well. With twice the pieces, I also wanted to expand the accessories and scenery of the LEGO Formula 1 garage, matching the scale of a Speed Champions car in that respect as well.

Looking at the functional part first, the Speed Champions car is both heavier and denser than a City one. The LEGO City car’s spoiler tucks into the wall to be shot forward when you press down on the L-shaped Technic parts, but the rear end of a LEGO Speed Champions car has more to it, so that exact function doesn’t work in the same way.

Instead, I had to strip back the rear wall of the garage, leaving a gap in the white bricks so as not to block access to the car for the function to work. I doubled up the same function twice, aligning each one with the end of the spoiler to give it enough power to send the bigger car forward. Although it looks a little messier from behind than the City version, it’s worth it to have a working launch function for this larger car.

Once I had the technical aspects down, it was time to beef up the rest of the build to fit the car. This is fairly easy in practice: double virtually everything. Double the white plates for the floor, double the Formula 1 logo on the wall, double the tyre racks that form the side of the garage, and double the computers and technical gear that line the sides.

Some elements don’t quite align perfectly: there aren’t pieces in the set to exactly match the length of the LEGO Speed Champions car. This can be overcome with some extra decoration to hide the slightly janky corner.

Thankfully, the simple colour scheme of the LEGO City set means that expanding the decoration is hard to get wrong. The three core colours blend together well, so you can expand walls and add more accessories without fear of them clashing.

The final look isn’t just a functional one, but also a detailed way to display the LEGO Speed Champions car. From above, it looks very much like a working Formula 1 garage, but even when folded out, it adds a dynamic backdrop to the car. The white plates form a base for one car, while the rest of the ‘garage’ hinges out to allow for interaction with minifigures and for a better look at all the motorsports details.

Although the arm is longer than the LEGO City version, it still tucks away neatly when folded in, allowing it to slot on to a shelf or into a wider Formula 1 display.

Increasing the scale of the garage keeps it more in line with modern real-life scale, as the LEGO Speed Champions cars are more accurate to minifigures in terms of proportions than their LEGO City counterparts. The Formula 1 cars that we see on tracks today are much larger than years before, measuring two metres wide and just over five and a half metres in length. This scaled-up redesign of 60444 F1 Garage & Mercedes-AMG & Alpine Cars is more proportional to the look of a real garage.

To try out this rebuild for yourself, you’ll need to pick up two copies of 60444 F1 Garage & Mercedes-AMG & Alpine Cars (see our original review here), available now for £69.99 in the UK, $79.99 in the US, and from €79.99 in Europe. Much of the build is simply doubling up on floor and wall panels, with the trickiest part being the technical function at the back.

These sets were provided by the LEGO Group for the purposes of this feature.

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