LEGO City 60444 F1 Garage & Mercedes-AMG & Alpine Cars review

LEGO City 60444 F1 Garage & Mercedes-AMG & Alpine Cars offers a deep dive into the behind-the-scenes race weekend work of an F1 team.

Continuing the world building that 60443 F1 Pit Stop & Pit Crew with Ferrari Car does so well with pit stops, 60444 F1 Garage & Mercedes-AMG & Alpine Cars takes us into the garage of an F1 team (a couple of them actually) to offer a detailed insight into the work that goes into these race cars.

Release: January 1, 2025 Price: £69.99 / $79.99 / €79.99 Pieces: 678 Minifigures: 5 LEGO: Order now

Behind the scenes

LEGO City is leading the way with LEGO Formula 1 sets, first out of the blocks for 2025 and also offering more insight and play into the wider workings of the sport than Speed Champions or Icons will likely ever do.

This is thanks to sets like 60444 F1 Garage & Mercedes-AMG & Alpine Cars, which provides not only a couple more of the team-branded cars, but also a large and detailed build of a double garage where mechanics and crew work their magic on these vehicles before, during and after each session of a race weekend. Putting all that into a LEGO set makes this immediately appealing to more than just the age-recommended builders of 7+, and for good reason.

The two cars included are for the Mercedes and Alpine F1 teams respectively and follow exactly the same build design as we’ve seen with the Ferrari in 60443 F1 Pit Stop & Pit Crew with Ferrari Car and the McLaren in 60442 F1 Driver with McLaren Race Car. As mentioned previously, where such a tactic of repeat building would typically draw criticism, it is a logical move from the LEGO City team offering consistency and cross-set compatibility that better serves a younger audience’s understanding of these very similar race cars.

As mentioned when we attended the unveiling of these sets at the 2024 Las Vegas Formula 1 Grand Prix in November, cars have been paired together based on their visual design and how clear it is for younger builders that they represent different teams. In this case, the clash is perfectly apparent, between the silver and teal tones of the Mercedes and the pink and blue markings of the Alpine.

The difference in colour is the only thing that separates the two cars which you build in succession, but such is the clever design it’s not an experience that drags on, feels overly repetitive or loses your attention. These City F1 cars are designed with a lot more to them than you may first expect, and two in a row really highlights that rather than anything else (still, if you buy all the City F1 sets and build them consecutively you will be able to put them together by heart by the fourth car). Building the Mercedes also showcases just how much forethought went into the singular design, for how it captures some of the particular details of that car’s livery from the top-down view.

Two into one

Usually, two teams don’t go into the one garage like this, but such is the way that 60444 F1 Garage & Mercedes-AMG & Alpine Cars has been designed it can make sense (until you swap out one of the cars because really that would be a whole lot more satisfying).

Beyond personal taste, it is possible at the moment to share the garage as the branding is – as it is with the pit crew and pit lane in 60443 F1 Pit Stop & Pit Crew with Ferrari Car – all themed to the Formula 1 brand, rather than to a specific team. The mechanics and support crew in the garage are in neutral attire with the F1 logo on their back, whilst the interior is coloured white, black and red as per Formula 1 branding (or Haas…).

This neutrality makes sense and ties the various world-building sets such as the pit stop and the transport truck together with the garage to all belong to the one team, whichever team you may wish for that to be.

Again though as stated with the pit crew in 60443 F1 Pit Stop & Pit Crew with Ferrari Car, we’re not sure the design of the neutral F1 garage team members quite hits the mark – they don’t look like they are mechanics, nor technical analysts. They fit the job, per se, but the nature of that job isn’t clear, and the door for a more generic design that ironically can bring better specificity to the roles we see in a typical F1 garage is still very much open.

Echoes of Speed Champions

The garage may also be neutral by design, but it nails all the right details to be as specific and authentic to what we see in a typical F1 garage and to give 60444 F1 Garage & Mercedes-AMG & Alpine Cars its real strength.

The aesthetic nicely matches the pit lane from 60443 F1 Pit Stop & Pit Crew with Ferrari Car, with that smooth-edged, futuristic, clean-tech feel that only F1 garages seem to nail so well, while a series of big (stickered) screens and desks built into the side walls reflect the busy background activity that goes on behind the scenes in preparing and fine-tuning these F1 cars.

With it being a LEGO City set and primarily aimed at the 7+ audience, nothing that is built here is particularly tricky to put together, but that doesn’t take away from how smartly it all comes together and how effective the simpler parts usage is in bringing everything together as well as it does. You can sail through building 60444 F1 Garage & Mercedes-AMG & Alpine Cars and still be left with a satisfying end result.

That end result also includes a pretty fun (and pretty realistic) play feature that allows you to launch the F1 cars from the garage at great speed. Obviously the real F1 cars immediately turn 90 degrees to join the pit lane, and your LEGO ones will only barrel forward, but it’s a surprisingly fun play feature that makes total sense to be here.

We should acknowledge, with one eye on what Speed Champions is bringing to LEGO F1 in March, that as a theme aimed at a much older demographic Speed Champions used to offer sets with world building settings and scenes within them, before market feedback and insights convinced the design team to just release cars and nothing more.

It makes you wonder what these sorts of sets would look like within that higher building level (if at all different, it has to be considered, and if so how high costs would rise with it). But if all we have to build around the sport of F1 is through LEGO City then the way this first wave of sets is going about it ticks a lot of the boxes that F1 fans need and that Speed Champions simply does not any more.

Our honest opinion: The LEGO City F1 line-up is producing some neat F1 cars and some even better broader sets that explore everything else trackside, and this is a great example of how well it works.

This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.

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