Hi, this is my first post on Eurobricks and my thoughts on the 42000 racer.
Bought this yesterday and built it right away, I'm a huge F1 fan, never missed a race since around 2000 so I just had to buy this. I only buy large Technic sets and put them on display never to be disassembled again, so looks are important for me. The model when built really looks stunning, it's large and dwarfs almost any other Lego model as an F1 racer isn't that large in real life, you have to choose carefully what you put next to this one. I want all my models to shine :) The front and rear wings are stunning, as is the looks when viewed from top rear and front. A modern F1 racer have a large front and small rear wing and this is well executed. The front (flat, and the two front panels) looks kind of ugly but it's actually quite authentic to for example the 2013 Mercedes F1 racer. The not so good about the looks is the side view. I have my Lego displayed from the side with back-lighting, the car looks almost cut in half when you can see right through the cockpit. Two more panels or beams would have cleared that up. Normally I think the brick-saving holes in official Technic actually looks good, I like to see the functions working on the models, but not this time.
I like the authenticity of the dampening, it's stiff as it should be. What I do not like, but this is understandable considering the size, and price of the model is the twisting. You can lift a wheel up a good 8 cm or so without any other wheel leaving the ground, I can only imagine but a real race car would not behave like this. We are not used to the steering wheel actually working, but on this model it does, thumbs up for that one.
I really like the inclusion of the DRS system (opening back wing), I do however not like the execution on this one. On a real car this system operates in a tenth of a second. As this is done with MLA this will take you a good five seconds to operate, I normally don't care if a function is implemented as their real life counterpart, as long as the operation is close real life, and this is ridiculous. The hood opening using gears is just bells and whistles. It's not needed, nice that you can open it though. I get the feeling this car is designed around the PF add on. But even with the PF add on the wing takes seconds to operate, AND it destroys the looks of the car. Both of these function would operate splendid on pneumatic (with an air tank, the DRS wing would be uber cool). I think TLG did a bad choice here.
All in all, I like the look of the car, I like the basic functions of the car, I really like the inclusion of DRS, but I think the execution of DRS and hood opening are just wrong. Especially considering they could be perfect using pneumatic.
