In the summer of 2021, my sister Lauren and I appeared on the second season of LEGO Masters on FOX. These breakdowns delve into each episode and talk about the process behind the build, the challenges Lauren and I faced, and the stories of our finished products.
I loved sports cars in middle school. In 7th grade, I was all about Ferraris--even had a poster of one hanging in my room. While that passion didn’t translate into adulthood, I still thought it was pretty cool to see the lime-green LEGO Lamborghini sitting on a pedestal when we walked onto set. At least, one part of me thought it was cool. The other part thought “I’ve never built a car chassis before. Are we gonna have to build cars from scratch??”
Will let us look at the car for all of 60 seconds before he pushed it off the pedestal. Then we were told that for the first part of this challenge, we’d have to build a replica of that very same Lamborghini from memory, in only four hours. What??
We were each given the “essential” LEGO Technic parts pulled from the Lamborghini set that would be needed to recreate the car. It wasn’t even close to the number of parts in the actual set--which I was happy about, since that would’ve been so overwhelming. We were allowed to use the brick pit to supplement our builds. The parts they gave us essentially made up the skeleton of the car, and most of them were oddly-shaped Technic parts I had never seen before. You can see us in the episode looking at the parts like “what are these??”
Lauren and I decided to stick to our guns and create a brick-built base using black plates, which we thought matched the dimensions of the original car. We then built a frame of Technic bricks on the interior to which we could attach the lime-green skeleton exterior.
I’m no master when it comes to Technic, so I was learning on the fly how all these crazy parts fit together. Lauren took trips to the brick pit to gather all our supplemental parts as I tried to cobble something together like a mad scientist. The main advantage I felt I had was knowing the general shape of a Lamborghini. Wide, and low, with a square back section and pointed front. They’re inspired by charging bulls (oddly correlated to the next part of the challenge), and are meant to look menacing with sharp lines.
One aspect we struggled with was how the colors were broken out. You heard in the episode other teams going through the same issue--which area was black? Which area was green? I thought the top of the car was black, and Lauren insisted green. We went with black, but turns out it was both. We built little seats to go on the inside of the car to get some extra detail in there, but struggled a bit with creating the right shape of the windshields using flex tubes. I opted to place the flex tubes lower to capture that sports car shape, even if it was impossibly low for a person to actually fit in the car, which the judges called us out for!
When this part of the challenge was over, we just had to laugh. It was a non-elimination build, so some of the pressure was off. Honestly, I felt alright about our car. I was amazed we were able to put something together in 4 hours that looked kind of like a Technic Lambo. When we were all looking at each others’ cars, both Philip and Richard told me that ours reminded them of a Lamborghini Countage from the 90s. I had never heard of it, so Philip showed me pictures. He was right. Turns out we had built something that looked like a Lambo, only it was one from 3 decades ago.
When it came around to judging for this first challenge, Lauren and I were surprised and honored to get a top two mention from the Brickmasters. It wasn’t shown in the episode unfortunately, but it made my seventh-grade self proud.
Then we moved on to part two: the demolition derby. We had to build a crazy concept car on a remote control chassis that would go head-to-head with the other teams’ cars in the arena. We were each provided a standard R/C chassis, which had yellow Technic liftarms glued to the perimeter of the base.
Lauren and I decided to build “Beware the Bull.” We were inspired by fierce, charging bulls, and wanted to blend that ferocity with the ornate style of Spanish matadors. We set out to create a bull-like car that has stolen the matador’s cape, and is wearing it into the arena. For the racing stripes on the side of the car, we wanted to incorporate the gold detailing of a matador costume.
I was happy about the base chassis at first--at least we wouldn’t have to build our own chassis! But as we started building, I realized this setup was going to be really difficult to work with. The glued-on Technic liftarms were supposed to be “in system,” meaning proportionally scaled to LEGO bricks, but that turned out to not really be the case. We had to stretch and bend the bricks to get them to fit on the base. Lauren and I started by building a super-sturdy core. We locked Technic bricks to the baseplate, and built a strong, interlocked brick body with SNOT bricks on the side. We tried multiple techniques to get the core to stay on correctly, and it ate into our build time. By over halfway into the build, all we had was a super-solid core, with no aesthetics.
Lauren then tackled the intricate gold detailing on the car’s racing stripes, while I built the bull’s face and horns--making sure to include a nose ring using a flex tube! We also wanted the matador cape flying off the bull’s back to be a cockpit of sorts. With two hours left, I built the cape with several Technic liftarms anchoring it at an upward angle in a really strong position. While the cape might appear like it’s flapping in the wind, it was super sturdy. We also had to include a certain amount of space for a dashboard camera on the car, so I made sure to include that as well.
When the Brickmasters came around and we told them our idea, we got to talking about movies and how we wanted to call the build “Racing Bull” as a spin on “Raging Bull.” That name didn’t fly with production, so we adapted to “Beware the Bull.” When I mention it to Lauren in the episode, that is us brainstorming our new name! With about 30 minutes left to go, I quickly added fenders on the front and back of the car using angled Technic liftarms (again) to achieve the look. Lauren added gold details to the cape, plus the purple racing stripes that continued down the back of the car. This one was a race to the finish (no pun intended); 6 hours was not enough time! We were frantically placing finishing details on our taillights and fenders right until the last second.
The build was done, and it was time for the derby. I had practiced driving a little bit; we thought Lauren might do it, but after she tried it once, she quickly decided that I should be R/C Master. I’ve never driven a remote-controlled car before, so this was totally new to me. The control had two little wheels that looked like tires: one for turning, and one for forward/backward. It was not intuitive at all!
Once the derby started, I drove the bull right into the center of the ring and SMASHED into 3 other cars. The bull hung on really well! The front fenders, intended to bounce off the others and give a buffer, did just that for this first impact. We expected a lot of our gold detailing to fall off, but it didn’t at all.
Here’s the thing about the derby arena. It had hazards EVERYWHERE. Little tires, barrels, all kinds of things intended to disrupt the cars. What the producers didn’t anticipate, however, is that almost all of our cars would get stuck on these tire hazards. Unfortunately, the bull was one of the first to get stuck. I drove the car almost immediately over a giant tire, and it got perfectly wedged underneath the chassis. The rule was that if your car couldn’t drive for 60 seconds, you were out. Michelle was so great and tried to knock my car out from its stuck position (in the show, it looks like the unicorn was trying to attack the bull, but it wasn’t!) Unfortunately, it stayed stuck on the tire, and our car hit the 60 seconds really early on. It was a bummer, because the car had held up really well through all the impacts. What we didn’t expect was that this challenge was more about surviving the tires than the other cars!
I couldn’t believe when Caleb ran his car off the edge of the table. It seemed like TOO perfect of a TV moment. I felt so bad for them; their car was amazing, and totally embraced the challenge! I thought it was funny that our car had the perfect vantage point to see them careening off the edge: the bull was stuck on the tire at that point, right in the perfect spot for the dash cam to catch one of the most entertaining moments on LEGO Masters so far.
This challenge was definitely difficult, and not really in our wheelhouse. We wanted to bring a fun story to the derby with our bull and its stolen matador cape, and we think it would’ve done really well if it wasn’t for those dangerous tires! And, of course, we were really excited about our top two finish for the Lamborghini. Guess it might be time for me to pull out the old sports car posters again--or go buy that set. Might be a bit easier with the instructions.
