A couple years back, the manufacturer of the world's greatest creative toy, Lego, launched a site to source product ideas from its community. The idea was to lessen the burden on the company's design teams while allowing popular ideas to make it to stores with minimal effort required on Lego's part. It's a win-win for Lego: They get popular ideas fed to them with the blueprint of the set's construction and a price point picked out by their customers, and Lego only needs to cast, package, and ship the bricks.
Following in the footsteps of the Caterham Seven, Austin Mini, Ferrari F40, and Volkswagen Bus models that have already made it to market, there are several more eye-catching car models on the site, the most alluring of which is this Peugeot 205 T16 set, based on the Group B era of rallying.
Group B was an era that introduced widespread forced induction and 4WD systems to the rally world, forever changing its landscape. Manufacturers were only required to build 200 examples of a car to get it homologated by the sport's governing body. This led to monsters with upwards of 500 horsepower and hours of turbo lag, kevlar body panels, and people with a death wish like Walter Röhrl and Michele Mouton wrangling these cars through narrow, spectator-lined rally stages in places like Finland, Portugal, and Great Britain. It all came crashing down (no pun intended) after a string of fatalities in the 1986, some driver, some spectator.
It needs ten thousand supporters for the set to be reviewed by Lego, who, if the required quantity of supporters come forth, will then make a licensing deal with Peugeot for use of the car in one of their sets. It is almost like a petition, but the petition is automated and goes straight to Lego's design teams. If you are a fan of both motorsport and Lego, you need not be told to hit that support button on the Lego Ideas site. All we need now is an Audi Quattro or Lancia Delta S4 to race with this little Peugeot.
