Car Mods: Customizing the Speed Champions Camaro ZL1 and Ferrari F40

Today’s guest article comes from Caleb Wagoner, a car and sportscar racing enthusiast and AFOL from Virginia. You can find him online on Instagram.

Today we’re going to be taking a look at two LEGO Speed Champion sets, 76935 NASCAR Next Gen Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 and 76934 Ferrari F40 Supercar. While the sets you can buy from the shelf starting August 1st are great, I thought it’d be fun to mod them to make each one a little more special. So drivers, start your engines, and let’s get racing!

76935 NASCAR Next Gen Chevrolet Camaro ZL1

In the last couple of years, NASCAR has changed their cars to be modern racecars, and this set reflects that. I don’t watch much NASCAR myself, but I do watch a lot of endurance racing. NASCAR fielded a modified Next Gen Camaro in 2023 for the Le Mans 24-hour race, so that seems like a natural choice for me to turn this set into.

Photo via The COmeback

As a starting point, this is the built set which is so colorful! It really will be a statement piece for any Speed Champion collector.

Now as much as my mods might look like a straightforward color swap, it’s going to be a little more involved than that. I want to add the mirrors, dive planes, and rear canards. I pulled up this reference image and started building.

Photo via AutoSport

As I got started, I noticed the relatively new Vehicle, Mudguard 4 x 2 1/2 x 2 with Arch Round does not come in light bley (blueish grey). So this would be the first problem I had to solve. The way the set is designed using the slightly older mudguard wouldn’t work, so I opted to use black as it matches the 3x3 round tile with the flag print on it like in the reference photo.

When building the front bumper, I discovered that the new Wedge 2 x 2 x 2/3 does not come in dark blue. I experimented with Slope, Curved 2 x 1 x 2/3 and Wedge 2 x 1 x 2/3 which seemed like the natural choice to “make” one of the Wedge 2 x 2 x 2/3, but I ended up not really liking how it looked. As such, I ended up swapping the Slope, Curved 2 x 1 x 2/3 slope for a cheese slope which I felt captured the look the best. (Please ignore the cracked part… dark colored cheese wedges are notorious for cracking…)

Moving up to the hood, I played around with trying to brick-build the gold stripes, but the way the set is designed, you basically have to tile it exactly the way the set is designed. I knew I wanted to keep the blocking between the dark blue and light bley sections, so I split up the tiles to make that possible. (However the 1 x 1 quarter tiles are held in by gravity, so as my friends say, “gravity is a legal connection.”)

Moving to the rear wing, I was convinced that Arch 2 x 2 Inverted Corner with Recessed Stud came in Himeji Castle in black. How wrong I was. Dark bley was the next closest option, and depending on lighting, I think the wing on the real car can look dark bley.

Now that I had the majority of the car done, it was time to start adding the fun stuff; mirrors, dive planes, and rear canards! The mirrors were easy enough—I just used the spoon element like LEGO does as I feel this best represents the mirrors that were added to the car to make it Le Mans-ready. 

Next, I swapped out the 2 x 2 plate for a Plate 2 x 2 Corner and a Bracket 1 x 1 - 1 x 1 Inverted. I put a 1 x 1 quarter tile in black on the inverted bracket, which I think captures the look of the dive planes.

The rear canards are where it got interesting, though. The set uses Brick, Modified 1 x 2 x 1 2/3 with Studs on Side in the spot where the canards go. Some of that brick is actually structural, so I had to be careful in adding the canards. What ended up working was using two of Brick, Modified 1 x 1 x 1 2/3 with Studs on Side with the studs facing opposite directions from each other. This allowed for the rear end to still be stable enough and for me to add two 1 x 1 quarter tiles in black to represent the canards.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “What about the rest of the livery?” (I personally think it looks a little odd without it, too.) I am honestly not sure where to start with stickers. Given enough time, I could figure it out, but publishing deadlines mean this mod is done for now. Maybe there’ll be another article down the road on creating your own stickers for Speed Champions.

Here you can see the two cars side by side. It is quite amazing the difference that color and stickers make, though I quite prefer the additions of the mirrors and canards on the sides.

As I mentioned at the start of this section, I love endurance racing. So, I course, I have lots of models of the cars from the top class. So we can do a little bit of the Le Mans grid, including the Garage 56 Camaro.

76934 Ferrari F40

Inage via Hagerty

According to Ferrari, every F40 has left the factory in the color red.The black F40 in the image above was wrecked, rebuilt, and painted black by Gas Monkey Garage on the Fast & Loud television show. For some reason, when I think F40, this black car is what comes to mind, so it seems like a fitting change to me.

Unlike the Camaro, this color swap was a little more straight forward. Almost every piece was available in black to create this. So we’ll talk a little bit more about the model here.

All but three of the fifty-four sets that show up when I search “Ferrari” on BrickLink are red. (The other colors are two yellow and a blue car). I know when I visualize a Ferrari, it’s usually red. So Gas Monkey Garage painting their car black is definitely an oddball.

Black does, however, eliminate a lot of the need for subtle printing LEGO put on the sides of their model, and it hides a lot of the odd gaps. (The main one that sticks out to me is for the headlights.) It also makes the red of the seats pop out a lot more, which I find to be quite appealing.

Fun fact about the first picture of the “real” car in this section—it’s a composite image. The car was never actually driven or shot flames. It was taken in a studio and, in much the same way we edit MOC photos, the motion blur was added as well as the background. There’s a cool video on it here.

This is not the first time LEGO has created an F40 either. There’s the Creator Expert 10248 Ferrari F40, the first Speed Champions 75890 F40 Competizione, and even a life-size one! There is a lot of legendary status for people with this car, so it makes perfect sense that LEGO has made so many versions of it.

Here’s a morphed shot of the before and after of the red and black versions. You can see how the black looks a bit sleeker because it hides the gaps, and it certainly does not need any stickers.

The Checkered Flag

Racing has inspired many innovations that have made their way into road cars, making it an important development platform for manufacturers, and I’m also glad that the LEGO Speed Champions lineup is reflecting that progress. Overall, we’ve examined two color variations for these sets which made all the difference, and the process was more complex because of quite a number of interesting techniques and stud reversals. I also hope you learned something interesting about the cars they’re based on.

Thank you to BrickNerd for the opportunity to do something fun with these sets, too—without them, this would not have been possible!

The LEGO Speed Champions 76935 NASCAR Next Gen Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 and 76934 Ferrari F40 Supercar will be available starting August 1st for $27 US each.

DISCLAIMER: These sets were provided to BrickNerd by LEGO. Any opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.

What other colors would you like to see a Ferrari come in? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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