Silverstone marked the biggest build LEGO has ever attempted with Formula 1.
Every driver on the grid for the 2026 Pirelli British Grand Prix received a car of their own this year, a leap from Miami’s 2025 drivers’ parade, where cars were shared between teammates.
It was the clearest signal yet of how far LEGO Group’s partnership with F1 has grown, and why Global Marketing Director Sanne Bunch-Sorensen makes this year’s Sector50.
Bunch-Sorensen told Sector that the jump in scale traces directly back to how drivers and fans responded in Miami a year earlier.
“I believe that the Miami drivers’ parade that we had in May of last year was, as you know, quite successful on a number of different parameters,” she said.
“But first and foremost, everybody seemed to enjoy it, both the drivers and the fans.”
Opposites attract
Asked what makes the partnership work at this scale, Bunch-Sorensen described LEGO and F1 as fundamentally mismatched organisations that happen to complement each other well.
That combination, LEGO’s imaginative culture paired with F1’s obsession with precision, is what Bunch-Sorensen credits for the ambition behind Silverstone’s build in the first place.
“We are each other’s opposites in the sense of engineered control meets that of creative freedom,” she explained.
“But we are also each other’s equals in the sense of we are fellow thrill seekers, and creativity is very much something that both partners appreciate and use in day-to-day work.”
From idea to execution
Not everyone inside LEGO believed the scale-up was achievable once it was proposed.
For Bunch-Sorensen, seeing that kind of doubt is a normal part of taking on a build of this size, and that the real challenge was never the concept itself.
“The first time you hear, should we do 10 big build cars? Some go, ‘we can’t do it’,” she said.
“They say ‘we can’t do it in the time that we’ve been given’. Or, ‘that’s a ridiculous ask’. It was similar this time”
She separated the difficulty of coming up with an ambitious idea from the difficulty of actually delivering it, framing the latter as the far harder part of the job.
“Once you have come up with that right idea, the hard part is then to actually make it happen. Bringing something into existence that wasn’t there before, bringing it to life,” she said.
“I think that’s where team comes in. We had to build a crowd of fellow enthusiasts within the business, because it wasn’t easy.”
Why Silverstone?
The choice of venue came down to practical considerations as much as symbolic ones.
Bunch-Sorensen pointed to the switch from a US race to a European one, realistic build time, and the physical demands of the track itself as deciding factors, with the circuit’s engineering profile mattering more than fans might expect.
“We had amazing engineers and designers obviously working on it, which is up for a challenge any day,” she said.
“But still, they did appreciate the non-banking environment of the Silverstone track.”
There was one aspect of running such an activation at the British Grand Prix that was completely out of LEGO’s control.
Weather was a genuine concern given Silverstone’s recent history of wet British Grands Prix weekends.
“We had a bit of fun discussing the possibility of rain,” revealed Bunch-Sorensen.
“Because if you look back at Silverstone, the last couple of years, right, it’s been a rainy and windy one.
“So we also felt very lucky that it was the sun. It just turned out to be a very beautiful thing. It would also have been so in the rain, but it was an extra little gift that it was sunny at Silverstone this year.”
Shared vision
Beyond the Silverstone build, LEGO’s involvement in F1 Academy has grown into a core strand of the partnership rather than a side project running alongside it.
That growth is tangible – a dedicated LEGO racing identity now spans a livery, a race suit, a helmet, and a driver in Esmee Kosterman, giving LEGO a physical presence within F1 Academy that goes beyond branding on a car.
Bunch-Sorensen linked that expansion to an ambition that already existed inside LEGO Group’s own leadership before the F1 Academy relationship began.
“For us, it was a great opportunity to combine the vision that F1 Academy has of bringing more female talent into the world of motorsport,” she said.
“On our side, that’s also an ambition that has been voiced by our CMO, that we want to make sure the world knows the LEGO Brick and LEGO Play is also for girls out there.”
The car’s rear wing carries the tagline “built to race”.
Bunch-Sorensen said the slogan was chosen specifically to connect the F1 Academy sponsorship with LEGO’s own consumer messaging to girls.
“They too are built to race, and they find a lot of great inspiration and role modelling in Esmee and the other girls on that grid,” she added.
“It’s a fantastic storyline to be able to add to our partnership, and it just shows that once you commit to an idea like this, you find ways to keep building on it rather than treating it as a one-off.”
What comes next
Asked what follows Silverstone, Bunch-Sorensen stayed deliberately light on detail, but confirmed further activations are already in planning.
“Our goal is always to bring value to the F1 fans,” she said.
“We want to make sure that we bring value in a way that only the LEGO Group can do and always in new and surprising ways.”
Having built drivers’ parade cars in Miami 2025, podium trophies the same year at Silverstone, a Cadillac to ferry the top-three to the podium in Las Vegas and now a full set of parade cars at the 2026 British Grand Prix, one thing is for certain.
Each successive activation only raises the bar for the next one.
“We know that expectations increase and so similarly you should expect our activities to continue to be super cool and awesome,” concluded Bunch-Sorensen.
“And I’m very much looking forward to bringing more stuff already within this year as well.”
Silverstone was the biggest build LEGO has attempted with F1 to date.
Based on Bunch-Sorensen’s account of the internal resistance it took to get there, and the ambition she’s describing for what comes next, it’s unlikely to hold that title for long.
