Lightning McQueen

Lightning McQueen is not a real car and never has been. That matters for a LEGO® Speed Champions set, because every other set in the theme rebuilds something you could in principle walk up to in a car park. 77255 rebuilds a character — a CGI race car first rendered for Pixar's Cars (2006), voiced across all three films (2006, 2011, 2017) by Owen Wilson, and still the face of a franchise twenty years later.

The design wasn't pulled from thin air. Production designer Bob Pauley has said in studio interviews that McQueen's silhouette is a composite of a NASCAR Generation 4 stock car (the proportion of the greenhouse, the stance) and more curvaceous sports cars — specifically the Ford GT40, the Lola T70, and the 2006 Chevrolet Corvette C6, with grille cues borrowed from the 2006 Dodge Charger SRT-8. John Lasseter, who directed the first two films, is a known classic-car enthusiast; the real-car composite approach was his idea, on the principle that every Cars character should read as a specific make and era even if the logos never appear on screen.

The number 95 on McQueen's door is a Pixar reference, not a racing one. 95 is the release year of Pixar's first feature film, Toy Story (1995). The Rust-eze sponsor livery, the lightning-bolt graphic, and the headlight-stickers-on-a-closed-front-end (because the original Piston Cup cars are stock-car-style closed-eye prototypes) all date from the 2006 design. The character's appearance has been tweaked across Cars 2 and Cars 3 — flame details in Cars 2, a matte-finish makeover near the end of Cars 3 — but 77255 uses the classic 2006 livery.

The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles keeps a full-scale Lightning McQueen replica on permanent display. It is hand-built on a custom chassis, roughly the proportions of a modern NASCAR, and is the closest object in the physical world to a 'real' McQueen. That is the photograph at the top of this section — the car that inspired the brick, such as it is.