LEGO Speed Champions summer 2024 set paints a perilous picture for 2025

LEGO Speed Champions is celebrating another record year of releases – but one of its latest Formula 1 sets exposes the perils of going big, and may just be an ominous sign of things to come…

Racing fans have had it pretty good on paper in 2024, with 12 eight-wide cars speeding on to shelves from Billund. That’s a record-breaking number of vehicles within 12 months, split across a record number of sets and a record number of waves. For LEGO Speed Champions, things are on the up. Or at least that’s how it seems at first glance. But while the LEGO Group ramps up output, has quantity come at the expense of quality?

It’s a question worth asking not least for those fans who feel an overwhelming burden to collect every single LEGO Speed Champions car – there are plenty of us out there – because though every Speed Champions wave has its highs and lows, the theme has generally maintained a consistent level of quality since shifting scale from six to eight studs wide in 2020.

And really, it’s difficult to point to a single LEGO Speed Champions set in the past four years that’s failed at its core task. These are still incredibly complex builds packaged up in relatively cheap boxes, often outstripping the vast majority of 18+ sets in that regard, so even if a particular car isn’t your cup of tea (tastes always differ) there’s usually something to appreciate.

Most of the time that’s the effort put into each and every one of these sets, and that’s where the summer 2024 wave starts to come unstuck thanks to one product in particular. We’re talking about 76925 Aston Martin Safety Car & AMR23, a two-pack of cars we’ve technically already seen at eight studs wide (albeit in slightly different visages), and a set that suggests LEGO Speed Champions may now be stretching the boundaries of its budget.

While these cars are technically repeats, neither is a replica of its former incarnation. They’re recoloured and tweaked in small ways: the Vantage is furthest away from its predecessor in 2022’s 76910 Aston Martin Valkyrie AMR Pro and Aston Martin Vantage GT3, built with plenty of different pieces, but that model is still so fresh in the mind that this safety car – when finished and in hand – will feel just that little bit too familiar for even recent converts to the Speed Champions garage.

The most obvious culprit though is the AMR23, which is so, so similar to March’s 76919 2023 McLaren Formula 1 Car that for all intents and purposes it might as well be the same build. Again there are tiny tweaks, pretty much all found around the back of the car, but nothing that would have required the designers starting from the ground up. In short: this set will not have taken the same amount of time to design as any other in 2024.

It’s a necessary evil for Formula 1 cars of course, and one that we’re likely to feel the brunt of again in 2025 (more on that later), but the repetition would maybe have been more forgivable if the colours of these cars were more accurate. Green is a strange choice, as demonstrated by the box itself – the real-life cars pictured there are clearly closer to teal within the LEGO palette – and it’s here where you’ll feel the theme’s budget really hit its limits in 2024.

The money was clearly not there to recolour enough parts in teal for 76925 Aston Martin Safety Car & AMR23, which is surely the kindest explanation for its colour scheme given teal would have a) been a much closer fit and b) made for a unique entry in the LEGO Speed Champions line-up. So the question now is, what do we want from this theme? Is it just more cars? Or is it better cars? Perhaps a better variety of cars? More unique sets?

All this is not to say that these Aston Martins are bad. In isolation, they’re great. Phenomenal even. The safety car does the business as a Vantage (leave off the rooflights and stickers for something less specific), and this really is such a strong Formula 1 car, making effective use of new and recent elements to conjure up an almost-perfect racer – one that’s streets ahead of even the 2022 Mercedes F1 car. But then it should be: it’s just the orange McLaren, a fixture in Brick Fanatics’ Top 20 LEGO sets list, recoloured in green.

Which brings us back to 2025. With all signs pointing to a year of Formula 1 across multiple themes and a complete starting grid of 2024 cars coming to Speed Champions in March, it does feel like 76925 Aston Martin Safety Car & AMR23 is an ominous sign of things to come. With little variation expected across those 10 sets beyond their colours, stickers and perhaps a few design tweaks here and there, the feeling of repetition probably isn’t going away any time soon.

The solution in that case might well be to keep the theme’s output high, and even higher than it has been in 2024, so that these Formula 1 cars don’t cannibalise the variety of sets that LEGO Speed Champions can and should offer. A second wave of sets is rumoured to be landing in the summer, but there’s no word yet on what that might include.

And yes, for those playing along at home hellbent on collecting them all, that does mean you’ll probably be building new McLaren and Aston Martin F1 cars in 2025. Maybe we’ll finally get a teal one this time?

This copy of 76925 Aston Martin Safety Car & AMR23 was provided by the LEGO Group for review.

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