Where I did not expect to like this set. I mean; it’s grey, it’s a car, seen it all before, so I thought. I was wrong.

I’m not sure about Technic cars. I know cars appeal to many people, and most people drive cars so they can relate to them, but in a model their appeal is mostly in their shape or appearance. For me Technic is about mechanisms; things that move. A pair of wheels, some steering and even a transmission just doesn’t excite me that much anymore. Colour me surprised by The 2 Fast 2 Furious Nissan Skyline GT-R a medium-large scale Technic car that excites me.

This car is available from the 1st of June 2025 for AU$249.99/£129.99/US$139.99/€139.99 containing 1410 pieces. This number of pieces puts it below the really large scale vehicles, but well above the smaller Technic cars.

Join me as I explore why this car was different for me, providing (almost) more excitement than the new 42209 Volvo L120 Electric Wheel Loader (review coming soon).

“There’s always room for family.”
(intro)

If you want a big grey set, I would recommend Star Wars. If you want a big Technic model, I would usually suggest a model where you can see what the mechanism does, like a construction machine. If you’re into cars I would personally opt for a good looking vehicle with some colour. But if you like even a little bit of the Fast & Furious energy, then stop right here and get on board.

The Nissan Skyline GT-R (R34) was Brian O’Conner’s car in the movie 2 Fast 2 Furious. Nissan Skylines by themselves are quite accessible regular passenger vehicles, which may add to the appeal of seeing a souped up racing variant that feels ‘in reach’ for ordinary humans. Note that of the R34 variant only very few real street-legal versions exist (11 according to this website), so the car is just as exotic as any hyper-car really.

Reviewing this car made me dig up my copy of Dom’s Dodge charger [42111] from 2020 for comparison, because it appears to be the same scale and style. While at it, obviously the Speed Champions editions of these same cars needed to be added [76912 Dodge Charger and 76917 Nissan Skyline]. For science.

The difference in size of box between Dom’s Charger and The Skyline hides that the Nissan has significantly more pieces (1410 versus 1077), but both result in a big impressive car.

All of these models capture the vibe of the cars well at different price points and scale, but at the end of this review I plan to have explained why the larger versions offer something that not many Technic cars have done for me so far.

“That’s the Brian O’Conner School of Driving right here Baby!”
(build)

The box looks elegant with the black background really making the grey car pop. The blue aura in the background is a hint to the under-glow lighting of the vehicle in the movie, it’s interesting that they added the glow on the top but not the bottom. Note that the Speed Champions version does have transparent plates on the bottom to represent the under-glow.

The rear of the box show a picture from the movie (note the under-glow) and a picture representing the drift feature of the car. When seeing this I was still a bit ‘meh’ but it gets better.

Inside the box is a stack of plastic bags, just as I was getting used to paper bags; this makes me wonder if Technic pieces are sorted in a different facility, or is this just a coincidence? Please let us know if you find paper bags in your version of this set.

A significant sticker sheet is included; I imagine you could leave the stickers off to mostly get a ‘normal’ Skyline, but the paint job is one of the iconic aspects of the car in the film so you kind of have to, don’t you. Especially since the base colour is ‘primer-grey’ (I’m quite positive that’s the official term). The wheel arches are painted so you will get the blue stripes on those parts even if you do not apply stickers.

Note: the original colour of the car used in the movie was blue, and it got this paint job just for the shoot, and then was painted back to blue by the owner [Motor Authority].

The build commences with construction of the rear axle with differential and suspension. Cool if you haven’t seen it before, but, alas, I have seen this a few times before. The lime green axle bush excited me most out of this first part, I cannot recall having seen many lime green Technic pieces.

The next section assembles the rear bumper and number plate, with a clear and red rear light. This gave me an opportunity to explain that the clear light is the reversing light the red on the fog light to my son; not many cars in Australia have fog lights.

We move on to the first ‘stunt’ part of the car; the balls that can extend below the rear of the car. I was in awe about the neat angle at which they are mounted and the clean mechanism to drop them down, but there are a lot more moving parts triggered by the lever on top, which’ purpose will become clear soon.

From here the build moves forward with the next bag providing the middle of the vehicle with seats and three bottles of Nitro, because who doesn’t have a bit of Nitro on board for their daily commute!

The front wheel (steering) section is build separately and then connected as a whole to the rest of the car, and then covered by a 6 cylinder in-line engine, or rather, a row of crank-disks (which continue to disappoint me a bit). So far we’ve only seen one new thing in this car, which is the drift mechanism that lowers the balls behind the rear wheels, and seems to connect the rear wheels to the front wheels and I am intrigued why four-wheel drive would be a feature needed for drifting.

Since most of the structure for the car is now complete we move on to the panelling and decoration of the car. Large wheel arches with printed stripes appear, teasing of things to come. Most parts are grey as they are being assembled but a lot of visible parts get stickers on them. Because they show a striped pattern I really wanted them to align properly, but it doesn’t seem to work out exactly, no matter how hard I tried. It’s almost as if the sticker designer didn’t account for the distance between the parts during design.

The blue lines do work very well with the blue in the driver’s seat and the overall car gets a bit of ‘oomph’ from it. Turns out I do admire a good bit of graphic design. Look a them stripes!

Next up comes the rear of the vehicle where we encounter a ‘off grid’ connection, highlighting the benefit of the Technic system. The area mounting the rear lights with a 5 stud liftarm diagonally over a distance of 5.1 studs, essentially pulling the corners together a bit. This creates some subtle angles around the corner of the car making use of the flexibility of the pieces. On one hand this rubs against my orthogonal thinking of LEGO, on the other hand I love how this stretches the possibilities.

The rear trunk of the car with massive spoiler is created separately and allows you to adjust the spoiler to your desire and provide some storage space if you want to move the Nitro somewhere else.

With the rear done we move on to the front. First mounting the doors and the fixing them by connecting the A-pillars with these unusual double-diagonal 3-hole lift-arms. I really hope they will be called ‘A-pillars’ because they seem to be very much designed to be an A or C/D pillar in a car; let’s call a horse a horse.

Next is the front grille, bottom bumper of the car and the dashboard with steering wheel. Several display panels are included representing the layout as seen in the movie. I do not have a technic figure (yet) to try the scale but even without figure this is an impressive looking setup. It appears a little spartan, but that fits with the street racing style for me.

The rest of the front gets finished next, with the blue lines created with parts, rather than stickers, really giving it more racing presence. Worth noting is the angle of the bonnet; the ‘wing’ part is connected with 1 pin to the lift-arm which then has another pin wedged in the cavity next to regular mounting holes. This, again, takes the build off-grid (in a Technic sense) creating very nice subtle angles that I would not even consider.

I really appreciate that the bonnet can be lifted and the cylinder tops can be seen. Sure this is not realistic, but if I go through the trouble of building piston movement I want to see it! (yes this is looking at you “Technic Ultimate Car” series!)

To finish off the build we mount the wheels. The designers used a neat trick to emulate alloy wheels; using black wheels with a light rim in front of it; a bit like the 80’s style hubcaps before alloy wheels became common (I will not say affordable).

The end result is a very convincing looking large vehicle.

“How do ya like them apples?”
(parts)

With the assistance from our ‘remote-office-knoller-in-training’ I present to you the contents of the bags in this set. As expected a lot of grey pieces, but also a few standout colours and shapes.

The second bag provided a few surprised for me. The smooth black balls are new to me; I’ve seen LEGO balls before but I cannot recall they were ever this smooth (which is crucial for their function later on). Another new exciting part is what I’d call tiny-liftarm-with-tiny-axle-on-the-side (official name apparently “BEAM 2M, W/ CROSS AXLE“). The part that really got my gears going was this set of parts called ‘clutch’ (46835 and 46834).

For me a ‘clutch’ is a device that can either engage or disengage rotating parts (in a car typically the engine and the wheels). In LEGO sets there have been torque limiters (clutch) that start slipping if gears get stuck, to avoid motors breaking for example, but this set doesn’t have any motors.
Also, once this particular LEGO clutch is assembled it is very stiff. As noted in this post on Stackexchange it is very difficult to rotate these parts once assembled so I was a bit concerned that an axle might still break before this clutch disengages.

So that you do not have to, I pushed this one to it’s limit to see what happened. Turns out LEGO engineers (yes engineers, not designers) know what they’re doing; as you move the front and rear wheels in opposite direction eventually the gear clicks and releases tension. This sounds a lot like a skipping gear but I can imaging this will keep parts from breaking.

The reason this clutch gear is included here is now also clear. There is a significant ratio increase between the front and rear wheels when they engage (see next section); this means that if you turn the front wheels, the rear wheels turn a lot faster; which can put quite a bit of strain on the axles and gears. The clutch is there to help when you push it a bit too far.

Within the piles of parts the 3-hole lift-arm now seems to have a cross axle connector in the middle rather than the conventional hole; I can see a lot of uses in this and I wish I could just do a ‘update now’ on my older LEGO pieces, like I can do with the software on my phone.

The axle with hole at the end will be immensely useful for compact applications, just like the aforementioned ‘beam 2m with cross axle’.

Finally the wheel hubs are worth mentioning again; they may not be as flexible as the previous special mention but they do allow for some really nicely finished wheels that I can see appear in many other vehicles.

“Hahaha ejecto seato man! It works! I love this button.”
(drift mechanism)

The drift mechanism is the champion of this set. Without it this would have been just another car (yes you heard me), albeit with a movie tie-in. But the drift mechanism is at a different level; when engaged the balls at the back of the car lift the wheels *just* off the ground and connect the rear and front wheels. When you then move the car and the front wheels move, the rear wheels move faster, making it appear as if they are doing a burnout or drifting. The way this is executed is so cool that it had me playing with the car over and over. Have a look at how the mechanism engages from the bottom:

and what it looks like when the car is driving:

It occurred to me that this is what makes both the large Technic Fast & Furious cars interesting; the inclusion of some of their stunt gear. Dom’s Charger comes with a wheely bar, exactly like they used for the stunt in the film, and the Skyline comes with burnout/drift simulation. This brings these cars to the next level for mechanisms and I applaud the design team for including these features.

Watch all videos for this set here on Youtube.

“He did the “stare and drive” on you, didn’t he?”
(overview)

Most large car sets, Technic or Icons, now come with a working steering wheel. This feature was not present in Dom’s Charger but it is present here. You can steer with the hand-of-god on the back of the roof, or you can use the steering wheel inside. The car has suspension, again no surprise, and differentials, par for the course, almost, and these things don’t make the set stand out.

But this is a great Technic set. I might not like building Technic as much as I like building regular LEGO, but I do love showing anyone a cool Technic mechanism, and this one resonates. Drifting this car is just fun. The mechanism is executed very elegantly, the car looks the part and it just makes you want to push it around.

“I seen you checkin’ her out man.”
(conclusion)

I didn’t expect to like this set, but I do. I like it more than most Technic sets I’ve built in years and I even like Dom’s Charger more because of this one. Thanks to LEGO for providing this set for review.

I can strongly recommend this set to anyone with an interest in a slightly more complicated cars. I prefer this over the really super-sized cars and it is much more affordable too. This set isn’t exactly cheap but it seems to be around what you pay nowadays for a Technic set of this size; unlicensed models have become rare.

Rating the set is tricky; if you like Technic and looking for a set in this price bracket, absolutely go for this one: 5/5 Technic praise points. If you see Technic as a necessary evil to support adding movements or to strengthen your LEGO builds, then this is probably not your thing: 3/5 non-Technic praise points.

What’s next? With these two large Fast & Furious cars I have some hope that more of these cars come will be adapted, as long as they include some stunt feature. This year the Speed Champions 77241 – 2 Fast 2 Furious Honda S2000 will be released, hinting that perhaps that one is next. But what kind of stunt feature would be included for that one? The bridge jump is memorable for that car, but not really a feature of the car. Perhaps a remote control version (they remote controlled the car for that jump)? Neither of those features would really be too interesting for me, but I didn’t expect a burnout to excite me like it does no.

The 42210 LEGO Technic Nissan Skyline GT-R32 contains 1410 pieces and goes on sale on the 1st of June 2025 for AU$249.99/£129.99/US$139.99/€139.99, but is available to pre-order now.

This set was provided by The LEGO Group for review purposes. All opinions are our own.

If you have enjoyed this post, please feel free to share it with your friends, families and communities. You can also keep up to date with us by following The Rambling Brick on our socials: Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, Tumblr (or just sign up for our mailing list) and find some extra content on Instagram and TikTok.

We really value your feedback: please let us know what you think about the sets we review, and the articles we post. And if you wish to support the Rambling Brick, consider clicking on our affiliate links before going shopping at LEGO.com. The Rambling Brick receives a small commission, and it costs you nothing extra.

Until Next Time,

Play Well!