5 Things I Love About LEGO’s 2023 Ford GT
And 3 things, I don’t…
I’m experimenting, OK? LEGO reviews on YouTube are a different thing than on Medium, because — pun intended — the medium is different. Being the TOP writer in this niche, I reserve myself the right to try various approaches to presenting new LEGO sets to those interested in one of the most popular building materials of all time — the LEGO brick. Therefore, this review comes in the form of a listicle, something I traditionally dislike, but might prove like a fitting format for easy-to-scan reviews for those with little time to spend reading, but equally entertaining for those who don’t mind the 3–4 minutes of read-time. So, without further ado and excuses to drag this introduction out, let’s see what I love so much about LEGO’s latest Technic set #42154, the Ford GT.
All the great things
For a quick context, this set is meant to be an 18+ set. As established many times before, this means absolutely nothing in terms of build complexity other than perhaps someone under the age of 12 should probably wait a couple more years to have a go at it. The box, among other things, contains 1466 pieces and costs roughly 120 bucks, which brings me to my first point.
- The price is actually not bad, though not particularly great either. 1466 pieces for a 120 bucks set didn’t make me feel like I was overpaying, even if it’s a licensed set. That being said, if you look at January’s Bugatti Bolide, with roughly 900 pieces coming in at just 50 bucks, for just 100 euros or dollars you can get 1800 pieces, with 20 bucks left to spare, so that would definitely be a better deal overall. However, the 120 euro price-tag is still something I love, because, we’re talking about a supercar closer in size to the actual supercars, but at a much more affordable price-tag.
- The design. As soon as I saw the leaked box designs, I knew I’ll be buying it on release day, and so I did. It looks gorgeous, and it does look just as gorgeous in person too. It does justice to the actual car, and the colour-scheme is something I really, really like. That dark blue with white stripes works perfectly.
- Suspensions. Of course, this is not the first $120 set to have suspensions, but I love that it does. This instantly means it’s a lot more complex build, with differentials, steering combined with individual suspension for each wheel. Add to that the ability to deploy the rear spoiler with a lever next to the driver seat, plus a front hood and rear engine-bay you can open, and you already have yourself a fun car to play with. But that’s not all! The doors also swing open, and you get hand-of-God steering for maximum playability!
- The size. One of the main issues with the premium LEGO supercars — besides their eyewaterinw price-tag — is their size. They’re huge. Jaw-droppingly awesome, but huge. Finding a place to store them is a constant problem. Not so much with the Ford GT. While most definitely bigger than the Bugatti Bolide, it’s considerably smaller than the 2016 Porsche, for instance, or any of the other supercars, like the Bugatti Chiron, Lamborghini Sian or the latest Ferrari Daytona. This makes the Ford GT much easier to store and thus a lot less of a struggle to justify buying when space is limited. Below you can see comparison images. I even made sure to compare it to the Creator Expert Ford Mustang. They’re surprisingly similar in size!
- The build itself. With five major build sections, it actually took me a couple of evenings to build the car. For a relatively medium-sized build, the designers managed to cram a lot of interesting building techniques into the set. Some of the angles they managed to achieve left me quite impressed. The use of a transparent V6 engine is also a nice addition, I have not seen these in a while. The door mechanisms, while manual, they’re still very cleverly built, especially when considering the odd angles they had to incorporate.
The not so great things
As much as I love the Ford GT, there are three things that do bug me somewhat, and I felt it was only fair I mentioned them before wrapping this review up.
- Stickers. With over 20 stickers, I felt LEGO could have put a bit more effort into brick-building some of the details they decided to achieve with stickers. The front and back grills and also the rear spoiler stripes could have been easily achieved with bricks. I will admit that the stickers do look good, but at $120, I feel things could have been achieved with bricks too.
- The side-view mirrors, while following the original design of the car, I also feel they’re sticking out a tad too much and were achieved with pieces I don’t quite think were the best choice. They feel like an afterthought.
- While hand-of-God steering is nice and great for playability, I wish the actual steering wheel would have also been connected to the steering mechanism. It could have been done with not a lot of extra effort and pieces. After all, this is a $100+ licensed Technic supercar set.
All in all, I think the Ford GT is a very welcome set, positioned between the smaller $50 and the high-end $350 supercar models. It manages to provide a lot of the functionalities its premium 1:8 scale siblings do, in a smaller and lower cost package, without making it feel cheap. It successfully delivers both in terms of design and functionality. I certainly hope to see many more sets in this category in the future. Purchase with confidence.
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.
