When we built LEGO’s 2,704-piece rendition of the Porsche 911 GT3 RS a few years ago, we were equally impressed and daunted by the thing—the instruction booklet was 578 pages long to begin with, and the bags of tiny bricks and bobs underneath that tome were far fuller than your typical birthday goodie bag fare. Finishing this kit is on par with toiling away on a traditional paint-and-glue-it-yourself scale-model in the sense of the immense satisfaction and emptiness you feel once it’s completed, but otherwise it’s a very different construction process than you’d get with the Revells and Tamiyas of the hobby shop world.
With LEGO, you get to feel what it’s like to be a mechanical engineer rather than just an assembly-line worker, and while you lose a good deal of accuracy of form when working in the medium of bricks and bendy tubes, half the fun is in trying to build something that’s discernible as a replica while working within the constraints of whatever you’ve got in the “LEGO box”—we all had one of these, right? The official kits are cool, but they never feel as fun as just coming up with something on your own, perhaps because when the company HQ runs into a tricky section in their build they can just manufacturer a few thousand versions of a new piece to conveniently plug the hole.
This is why this Stratos is so much cooler than the GT3—a regular dude just took the parts from the bin—in this case he used the GT3 kit’s pieces, plus just one extra one to complete this Lancia—and built something that looks better than the thing it was intended to be. It’s innovative, creative, and really, this kind of project is the whole point of LEGO-like toys. The creator, who goes by “Pleasedontspammebro” (don’t spam him), also has his reworked gearbox on display on his page, which is a more localized but equally interesting bit of repurposed kit.
If you’re tired of the orange GT3 on your shelf and would rather see this Italian rally star there instead, you can purchase the instructions in PDF form at this link for about $17. Considering the original Porsche kit needed to build the Stratos is selling for well over $200 on the secondhand market, this is chump change. The trunk and engine hatch both work too, as does the steering box connecting the front wheels to the little one in the interior. Even the Dino V6 is recognizable behind the plastic firewall.
Lancia images courtesy of Pleasedontspammebro/rebrickable
