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VROOM VROOM. What's that noise? Tearing up the roadways of Singapore, it must be… Set Titles: F138, F12berlinetta, 250 GTO, 512 S Set #s: 40190-40193 Theme: Shell Ferrari Year of Release: 2014 (?) Price at Release: Promotional Item Just browse the pictures? Flickr set INTRODUCTION Many thanks to LEGO for providing these sets for review. This is the second 'wave' of promotional racecar sets from Shell, which includes three more sets as well (a tanker, a pitstop, and a finish line). A combo review of those three sets will come soon, but for now, let's take a look at the l'il cars. Full disclosure: I am not much of a car person, or a LEGO car person (besides Cars cars since those cars were super-cute), but I am a LEGO person and an articulate person, so needless to say, I'll have opinions. I ALWAYS have opinions. Ok, let's roll. 40190 F138 The F138 is a Formula One car designed by Ferrari to be used in 2013. I guess these types of cars don't last very long because there was also a 2012 version and there is already a successor? I don't know, I'm just reading Wikipedia here. Don't judge me. Anyway, Formula One cars aren't exactly a new formula for LEGO; there have been lots of them. So maybe this subject matter isn't as exciting as some of the other cars in the series, but lets see how it fares just as it is. BAG Here's our friend the F138 cruising along some test-course-looking thing outside of a… hangar? Idk. Again, you've probably seen lots of red LEGO Formula Ones, so not that exciting. But do you see those yellow-looking rims on the wheels? I didn't before I opened it. Interesting. I have 'back of bag' pics for all of these sets, but honestly there's not much to see back there. If you want to see them, check the flickr set (linked below the stats, above). INSTRUCTIONS & DSS The instructions for all of these sets, along with the horrendously awful sticker sheets, come neatly folded in a separate little plastic bag with a trading-size card thing that has a picture of the cars. In my wisdom I didn't photograph these in number order, so you'll the card thing later on. Here's what the baggie looks like though (as you can see, it's the baggie for 40191, but no big dif). Now for the actual instructions and DSS of 40190. All of these sets come with truly awful sticker sheets. Of course mostly tiny parts make up these cars, and that means lots of tiny stickers. And I mean lots! Perhaps the cars would look bland without them; I wouldn't know. I painfully applied the stickers to stay true to LEGO's wishes. This set only had two stickers on 1x1s, so that's something. 1x2s aren't so hard to apply. PARTS The star of all these sets for many might be the parts selection. The F138 actually has one of the least exciting selections of the bunch, and one of the smallest. It's 48 parts including extras, and not many rare ones. The red tooth part has only appeared in two sets, so that's something, but you only get one here. The only other really neat thing is the four wheels which are printed in yellow on the ends. To my knowledge, this part has never been printed before, but I could be wrong. Regardless, the effect is pretty cool. Note that the colored 1x1 studs are just to swap color of 'driver' in the car; each color gets one extra. MODEL As luck of numbering would have it, this is the first car I'm looking at in the review and also probably my favorite. The stickers make a lot of sense on this car because real Formula One cars have tons of advertising all over them, and as I said before, these stickers aren't too terrible to apply, as things go. Overall it just has a really nice shape and really resembles the type of car that it's supposed to be. Plus, it's built quite differently than the last Shell Ferrari promo Formula One, and looks much better. The only possibly weird parts use is the white clicky hinge parts - I'm not sure what those are supposed to resemble, but they don't actually look bad, so it's all good. If it ain't bad, it must be good. Sound reviewing logic courtesy of CloneyO. One complaint I am going to have on some of the other cars is that their wheels stick out too much and look silly. On this type of car, the wheels do stick out, so they don't look silly on the LEGO version. Hooray! The whole back thing, whatever that's called in car lingo, is a neat design, and I like the single light. Very smooth and snazzy. Overall, this car has got the goods: good looks, good design, just not great parts. It only goes down hill from here. 40191 F12berlinetta When I saw 'F12berlinetta' written as all one word on the packaging, I thought LEGO had goofed. But I guess not. Old reliable (aka Wikipedia) tells me that's how it's supposed to be. It's basically a super-car made by Ferrari for public consumption, provided one is a member of the super-wealthy public. Super-car, super-wealthy, geddit? Like the F138 above, this car also debuted for 2013, so we're looking at recent stuff here. BAG Coming as not much of a surprise, the F12berlinetta appears on the same course as the F138. Maybe this is where Ferrari tests their new cars to ensure that they won't 'spload,' causing a multitude of tears to the driver, that person's friends and family, and the general public. From this picture you immediately notice the strange gappy design in the side of the car. INSTRUCTIONS & DSS Here's that little card thing I promised to show. All it is is a picture of six out of seven of the sets (no tanker), and the website Shell.com/LEGO on the other side. It would've been cool if these cards were different for each set, but they're not. The DSS for this set is actually the least dreaded of the bunch. There are three stickers on cheese, but the sheer amount of stickers clocks in at much less. Since I built this car first, my expectations for DSSes were set quite falsely. PARTS Not many rarities here, but nice nonetheless. I especially like the six red headlights, which thankfully cannot be adulterated by stickers. The Cars parts have some nice new prints, useful for everyday purposes. Having peaked at the Wikipedia entry for this car, I can't help wishing that the whole thing had been done in dark red. We already get a mostly-red car with the F138, and LEGO hasn't done an all dark-red car I don't think. That would have added a nice dimension to this model (and provided slightly more interesting parts due to color). MODEL When I first built this one, it really seemed rather bland to me. Since it uses the parts from the Cars sets, it looks to me like any other car that uses those parts. I didn't even know how this could be approximating something in the real world. Having looked at the real version, I understand why LEGO chose these parts for the shape and they actually do a tolerable job from the front, but the car still just seems ho-hum in appearance. Some of the design elements really don't quite come together. For one, the cheese graters in the side. Are these supposed to approximate curves? I guess they're distinctive, but they just look weird. The stickers on these side panels also don't quite work. They're supposed to look like the doors and door handles, but they don't blend well with the rest of the model. Perhaps they should have been designed to be a bit more cartoony. One thing this car does have going for it, though, is it's rear. As we say in the colloquial, 'it got a donk.' But actually, the little exhaust stickers are quite nice. The real car is of course smooth and curvy back here, while this is all angular and cheesy, but it looks nice on the model. In fact, it's the best looking part. I guess whoever designed this one was a butt guy. Sorry not sorry. The real unsightly feature of this car, though, is the wheels sticking out. They look straight-up goofy. Wheels don't stick out like that on real cars. LEGO needs to figure out how to make car models that don't do this. Overall, this model isn't a terrible approximation of it's real-life counterpart, but it's not good either. As a LEGO model it's pretty bland, the color is nothing cool or exciting, and there are some design flaws that just come off as weird. Not my fave. 40192 250 GTO Now LEGO takes it back to the 60's with this retro vehicle. Twas a time of funky curves and the like. Perhaps what this car most has in common with the others so far is that it costs a ton of money if you want to buy one in the real world today. BAG This artwork starts to mix it up a bit, showing a different part of the mystery course. The hangar thing still presides in the background, but now we get a pile of tires closer up to stop the 250 GTO from spinning out. We also get to move out of the 'red car' category into something more interesting and delicious. INSTRUCTIONS & DSS Due to the large car pieces being used once again, the sticker sheet for this car like the F12berlinetta is not so bad. Only two cheese stickers here. It's only a shame that one must sticker nearly all the tiles. PARTS The parts selection in this one really shines. We get ten(!) blue headlight bricks, which are not so common to begin with. They've been in a lot of sets over the years, but they're not in a lot of sets currently. Blue tiles and cheese aren't the most common things either, so that's cool. And most interestingly, LEGO made new Cars-style car parts - both of these are new. The hood section is curvier than any before, and the windows section is like a mini version of the previous one. It seems they really made these for this car, at least for now. MODEL The new hood piece does help add curves to the model, which is otherwise very naturally boxy. Looking at this next to pictures of the real thing, you can tell why LEGO made its choices. It was especially nice of them to make this car blue and not red, since I've found images of red ones online and LEGO seems to love red race cars. One of the big issues of this model, though, is that as a small LEGO model by nature it's not very sleek. The big parts can only do so much - it still comes off looking like a boxy rectangle on wheels. It's a good effort, but it doesn't quite work. The back, as you might of noticed, has an odd construction with a hinge to try and capture the angle on the back of the real car. It's sort of 'extending' the cheese slopes. Since it has a gap in it, though, it kind of looks like a spoiler. The biggest flaw in the model is once again the goofy wheels. If the sticking-out wheels weren't doing well on the F12berlinetta, here they really much up the look. They make the car look like it has huge floppy clown feet. The choice to use some studded plates on the top also isn't helping. Tiles might have made the thing give off the effect that it's curvier than it actually is. Once again, the model sort of looks like its source material, but it's just not a great model. The wheels throw it off, and otherwise it's too long and boxy to really be aesthetically pleasing. Great parts this time though. Maybe I'm biased because it's blue and blue is cooler than red. You can judge for yourself. 40193 512 S Moving forward in time just a decade, LEGO still stays retro with the 512 S. Again I've found pictures of red ones of these, so it's very nice that the powers that be chose not to go the red route. Yellow is awesome! As is everything. BAG Taking a really close look at the bags, it turns out none of the backgrounds are actually the same, though 40190 and 40191 are very similar. This one is more similar to those two than it is to 40192, though now the hangar thing is farther away. It's a snappy looking package, having a yellow car and whatnot, and a car that's completely different than the other ones. INSTRUCTIONS & DSS The 512 S has the worst DSS of all, with 11 stickers and six that go either on 1x1 tiles or cheese. It was really a stickering nightmare. I haven't hated stickers so much since the last Podracer set. I recall Anakin's pod was quite horrendous. PARTS What immediately jumped out at me in the parts were the wheels with gold trim. If I'm searching BL correctly, these have only ever had silver trim before (as in the F12berlinetta). The small bow in yellow is exclusive to this set according to New Elementary, and the larger one is very rare in this color. The printed windshield piece is of course exclusive as well. Overall, yellow is just cool. MODEL If you can get over the terrible stickers, the model really comes out quite slick. I still wouldn't exactly recommend applying stickers because I would personally use these sets for parts were I to have gotten them in the wild, but like with the F138, the stickers really work on this model. It's a racecar - it needs its number and racing stripes (not the movie about a Zebra racing with horses). It's a smart-looking model, no doubt about it. The low profile makes it look very fast and sleek, and it has a unique look, standing out from the other three in this batch. The tail/exhaust area has some great SNOT shaping to it; in fact, all of these cars use cheese very well, though I like this one especially. LEGO also made this car not suffer as much from the sticking-out wheel issue by bumping out the sides. The real car does have the wheels completely enclosed, but this looks fine on the LEGO model because it's a low-down racecar anyway. I was a little perplexed by the gap behind the windshield, but it turns out that the real car has an exposed driver and no roof, which this is trying to capture. It looks a little odd, but it's ok. I didn't fudge up with the '12' sticker on the 2x2 tile; the instructions actually instruct you to put it off to the side at an angle. The cheese stickers really were a pain, but again, I think they work for this model. Overall, the 512 S is probably my favorite car. It's got a pleasing, different design that just calls out 'swoosh me!' I love me some yellow, and the gold rims are ballin', so this car really hits it home in my book. CONCLUSION LEGO has certainly made a nice effort with these four, picking varied source material, varied designs, and varied colors. Most of them have some nice parts on offer; I would certainly use them for parts, as I've said. Maybe build them once to check out the designs, but not apply the stickers. Looking at them from a completed-model perspective, some work better than others. 40191 and 40192, using the bigger car type of parts, just don't look so great to me. 409191 is ok besides for the sticking-out wheels and strange cheese graters, but 40192 is really rather ugly. It's a shame, because blue is pretty, but the design doesn't work. The two low-down racecars are much better. Formula ONE cars have been done like crazy by LEGO, but 40190 still looks great and is a little model I'd want to keep lying around for some fun zooming. Did I ever mention that these all have pullback motors? Where they do. They work pretty well. 40193 is the real winner though, since the 512 S is something different and looks very cool in LEGO form. The stickers were awful, but the finished model truly comes together. Now that you know what these offer, it's up to you whether you want to pick them up, should you have the opportunity. I would do it.
