LEGO Speed Champions 76922 BMW M4 GT3 & BMW M Hybrid V8: A double-dose of winners? [Review]
What’s better than one LEGO Speed Champions car? Two LEGO Speed Champions cars! The latest dual-pack to be added to the theme is 76922 BMW M4 GT3 & BMW M Hybrid V8, with 676 pieces. Retailing for US $44.99 | CAN $59.99 | UK £44.99, and available from March 1st, this dual-pack depicts two racers from the same manufacturer, but very different racing backgrounds. Is this race going to be a one-sided affair, or will they both win our hearts? You’ll have to read our review to find out!
The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
The box and contents
Our BMWs come in a double-thumb-tab box, showing them crossing the start-finish line at a racetrack. The rear has some detail shots of the LEGO cars, while the real ones adorn the right-hand side.
There are seven bags in total, which feels like a lot for a set this size. But if you think we have too many bags, wait until you see the sticker sheet…
Or should that be, sticker sheets. There are three of them packaged in a cardboard sleeve together with the instruction booklets (one for each car). At least they won’t get bent that way.
We have 71 (yes, seventy-one!) individual decals to apply to these cars. We’d better get cracking…
The build
The first four bags from this set will go towards the M4 GT3 race car. The cockpit comes first, and I’m immediately impressed by how detailed it is! I like the inclusion of the safety net down the middle, and the steering wheel is the same new game controller print that appeared in 76919 McLaren Formula One Race Car. It’s flipped around here, but the print is made in such a way that it makes perfect sense in either orientation. Very cunning!
This wave of Speed Champions kits has seen a bunch of new moulds introduced. The 2×2 wedged slopes and 1×2 wedged tiles both appear in different colourways in each set, but in this one, they don’t always come in pairs, owing to the funky colourschemes that both Bimmers sport. Here are a few examples from the bag number two.
Speaking of funky – that’s how we’re getting with the rear bumper. It’s attached to the chassis with 1×1 studs with bars. The tail lights, meanwhile, are shaped with some neat half-stud offsets and those 1×2 wedged tiles, here in trans-red. That tiny BMW logo is printed on the side of a 1×2 plate.
A nice touch as we start bag 3 is the rear roof shaping. To replicate the M4’s gently curving rear roof, a stickered 1×4 tile is placed atop a couple of swivelling Technic pins, and slotted neatly in. It’s subtle, but effective.
After the rear wing and wheels (just the front ones, for some reason), we start building the front end from bag number four. Things are getting interesting now! First up, a Collectible Minifigure series stand is attached upside-down for the car’s floor. Then we build three studs-not-on-top (SNOT) assemblies…
… Which all come together to form most of the M4’s massive front grille, headlights and all. The look isn’t quite complete until the bonnet goes on, but it still looks pretty good.
Shortly afterwards, we come across some less complex but far more unusual construction. A single round stud and tile are connected together, slotted into a 1×2 modified tile with bar, and locked in with a jumper plate. You can just about see it above the side exhaust. I guess this is a legal technique? It is a snug fit despite not being attached to anything.
The rest goes together fairly conventionally, and we finally attach the rear tyres. Since these are race cars, they’re fitted with slick (i.e. untreaded) tyres. It’s a new dual-moulded part that looks very smart.
The BMW M Hybrid V8 car will also make use of these, so let’s crack into bags 5 and continue building. The only clever construction technique of note in the first bag of parts is what will form the ‘snout’ of the car.
1×1 studs with bars are again used to attach portions of the vehicle, this time for the sidepods in bag 6. Despite only having these two fixation points, they’re pretty solidly mounted.
New re-colour klaxon! These 2×5 tapered slopes have appeared in just one Speed Champions set before now, albeit in dark bluish grey rather than white. (Some printed ones are also in the aforementioned McLaren.) Before you can say ‘Bayerische Motoren Werke’, though, we’ve put some stickers on them and assembled them to the car’s rear fin.
Speaking of stickers – it’s around this point that we come across a particularly egregious instance of decal application. See that red arrow-shaped bit at the bottom left-hand corner of the windscreen? Yep, that’s a sticker. Just the red bit. The white bit next to it is printed. There’s a similar blue bit on the other side.
I dislike putting stickers on windscreens at the best of times – there are 5 in total on this one – but to have such a small sticker is infuriating. Doubly so, when the windscreen is already printed in places! Surely the printing could have extended to at least include these details on the bottom edge?
Anyway – enough ranting, back to the build. We don’t have much further to go, and it all goes by pretty quickly. The headlights continue the clever SNOT work we came across at the start of this car.
The minifigures
Two racing driver minifigures are included in this set: one male, one female. They both sport matching racing suits, different only in the base colour. The printing on the back is also identical.
As with most Speed Champs sets, the hair pieces can be swapped out for crash helmets; nothing special about these. There’s only one wrench, so our two pilots will need to share. Let’s hope they don’t both get punctures at the same time!
The finished model
The dazzle camouflage on both cars certainly makes them impressive to look at, especially as a pair. I’m not convinced the scale is quite right between them though. Something looks a bit off, but I can’t put my finger on it. Perhaps it’s the large windscreen on the M4 GT3.
Still, they both look good. Of the two, I think I prefer the M4 – that might be down to my stated preference for brick-built head- and taillights. On the M Hybrid V8, the headlight stickers aren’t really visible from the front, so it looks more like a bird with eyes on the side of its head than a prototype racing car.
What I do appreciate about the M Hybrid is its presence on shelves alongside 76916 Porsche 963, at least at the time of writing. The nature of LEGO’s set release cycles means we don’t always get race cars that would actually compete against each other in real life. But these two went wheel-to-wheel at this year’s Daytona 24 hour race, and no doubt will do so again in future race meetings. It’s cool that you can recreate that on your living room floor!
(The Porsche’s windscreen is printed all the way around, incidentally. Just saying…)
Conclusion and recommendation
It’s not unusual for Speed Champions sets to feature a lot of stickers, even more so when the subject matter concerns motorsport. Although it’s generally something I can live with, during this review, the stickers felt more like interruptions to the build process than extra detailing. It’s a shame, as this is otherwise a pretty good LEGO set. Over 650 pieces for 45 dollars is good value in terms of cost per part, especially with some new moulds and re-colours thrown in. Both cars look nice, albeit not flawless. I would probably recommend grabbing one of this wave’s single-car packs before the BMW two-pack, but you can’t really go wrong either way.
76922 BMW M4 GT3 & BMW M Hybrid V8 consists of 245 pieces, and will retail for US $44.99 | CAN $59.99 | UK £44.99, with availability starting from the 1st of March.
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