Review: 11375 Ferrari F2004 & Michael Schumacher
Posted by Huw,
11375 Ferrari F2004 & Michael Schumacher is the third in the series of historical Formula 1 cars that are modelled at a larger scale than Speed Champions, thus affording a higher degree of detail and accuracy.
That is certainly the case here: it's perhaps the best model of a Ferrari Formula 1 car to date, but it suffers from a major, inexcusable, flaw: one shared by many LEGO F1 cars.
Summary
11375 Ferrari F2004 & Michael Schumacher, 735 pieces.
£79.99 / $89.99 / €89.99 | 10.9p / 12.2c / 12.2c per piece.
Buy at LEGO.com »
An almost perfect model of a hugely successful car
- Smooth bodywork
- Attractive livery
- Looks great alongside others in the series
- Front and rear wheels are the same width
- Price has increased
The set was provided for review by LEGO. All opinions expressed are those of the author.
Reference
The Ferrari F2004 was the dominant car during the 2004 season, winning 15 of the 18 races, securing Ferrari its sixth consecutive constructors' championship, and Michael Schumacher his seventh driver's title.
In countries where tobacco advertising was still permitted that year, such as Monaco, Bahrain and China, Marlboro logos filled the white areas of the car: these are, of course, missing from the LEGO model, but at least it remains accurate.
Martin Lee from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Stickers and new parts
There are still plenty of advertisers' logos that need to be plastered over the bodywork, though, such as Shell and Vodafone, so the sticker sheet is extensive.
This series of cars use a dual-moulded plastic wheel/tyre combination that does not separate and doesn't flex like normal LEGO tyres. This year a new grooved version has been introduced, accurate for the slicks used during the 2004 season but, unfortunately, it seems the design budget did not stretch to making two widths, one for the front and a wider one for the rear, much to the detriment of the model's overall appearance.
Minifigure
In common with the earlier sets in the collection, a small stand that includes an inspirational quote by the driver is provided to display the minifig on.
The face print captures the German world champion's likeness fairly well, and the race jacket print is accurate too. However, this example does not seem to be very well printed: zoom in on the image, and you'll see the black lines are somewhat jagged, which I don't think is deliberate. It's not particularly visible under normal viewing conditions, but the camera's macro lens has shown all the imperfections.
It would have been good to have 'Bridgestone' on the front of his cap: headwear printing is not common, but it has been done.
The chequered stitching pattern is continued on the reverse of the torso, where the black printing seems a little better.
I have no complaints about the helmet, though, which is nicely decorated with seven stars representing the German driver's seven world championships. The 7th was added after the 2004 Belgian Grand Prix, at which he secured the title with four races still to go.
The completed model
Formula 1 cars of the early 2000s were not burdened with as many aerodynamic appendages as they are today, so they looked a lot cleaner, and overall the model looks excellent and a good replica of the real thing. The white spaces, devoid of tobacco advertising, make it look far more interesting than a wholly red car.
The wheelbase of the real car is just over 3m and that of the model 20cm, which makes the scale 1:15.
Formula 1 cars have wider tyres at the back for increased grip but, as I have already mentioned, that is not the case here. The regulations of 2004 required tyres of 355mm at the front and 380 mm at the rear. Thus, at the scale of 1:15 they should be 23.6 mm at the front and 25.3mm at the back. They are actually about 27mm, so it's not the rears that are inaccurate, but the fronts, which are too wide.
I know we harp on about this problem a lot here at Brickset, but it's all too common and, frankly, inexcusable nowadays. Would front tyres 4mm narrower than those at the back make a lot of difference to the overall appearance? Perhaps not, but for a model aiming for a high degree of accuracy and which it otherwise achieves, it's disappointing.
A stand identical to that in the other two models in the series is provided with which to mount the vehicle at an angle. I believe the plaque is devoid of errors.
The model features functional steering via the wheel in the cab, and the engine cowling can be removed to reveal the V10 engine. Note the hidden Italian flags under it and how smoothly the sides taper in towards the back.
The bodywork, which incorporates many of the compound curved pieces that have been introduced recently, looks excellent: virtually stud-free and suitably streamlined and aerodynamic.
Technic bushes represent the wheel nuts, which are blue on the right-hand side of the car and red on the left. This is pleasing attention to detail, especially as the red ones are appearing here for the first time.
Verdict
The new addition to the Icons F1 cars collection is shaping up to be one of the highlights of the year for me, and this one does not disappoint. I particularly appreciate the design consistency across the series, ensuring they look great when displayed together, as shown below.
It is a shame about the tyre widths, but it's not as big a deal as it would have been on last year's Williams where the difference was much larger. That, really, is just about the only thing to complain about regarding the design.
Unfortunately, though, the price has increased by £10/$10, to $89.99, £79.99, €89.99 for the 735-piece set, which is not good news.
Displaying with the FW14
I do not have Senna's McLaren MP4/4 yet, so I can't show the three lined up together, but this and Mansell's FW14 look great together, on or off their stands.
What's next?
The series has included three of the most successful Formula 1 cars in history, so assuming the range continues and does not repeat constructors, which car do you think will be next?
A Lotus '79 is an obvious choice: it introduced revolutionary aerodynamics, dominated the season it was raced in, and propelled Mario Andretti to the world championship. The main sponsor might be an issue, though.
I know someone in the Brickset team who would love a model of Tyrrel's 6-wheeled P34, and that would certainly be interesting!
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35 comments on this article
Tyrrel 6 wheel
Early Benetton Schumacher
Hamilton Merc
Lotus 79 in full JPS
etc
I think as widely discussed in thread on the release of this set the tyres are so close in real life that, at this scale, it is fine for them to be the same front and back.
And regarding future releases any cars that didn't have an alternative non-tobacco livery are going to make this tyre 'inaccuracy' look even more minor.
Jim Clark’s Lotus 49 (1967)!
Niki Lauda’s Ferrari 312T (1975)
James Hunt (1976)
Lewis Hamilton ?
I would like Alonso and his R25
Or the colorful Benetton B188 or B190 (but even with Nelson Piquet it's less iconic)(but the colours! ^^)
I know it's not a very "historic" car yet, but I'd KILL for an RB19 with proper Max Verstappen minifig.
One of the most dominant cars ever built with a GOATed driver? Absolutely fits the bill for an "icons" type line, even if the driver still happens to be actively racing. Everyone knows Max is going down an icon of the sport, and he's unlikely to ever match or top the success he had in 2023.
I'm personally fine with the tires, because it's such a small difference. The one thing i do find disappointing though, is the steering wheel, as they had started to put a billion buttons and LED screens on them in the mid 00's, and here it's just the normal round one.
Personally, i think the next one, provided they follow the decade system they have now and go for a 10's car, is a Vettel Red Bull, probably the RB7 from 2011, as the only other major driver from that decade is Hamilton and his Merc, and I don't think Ferrari would allow their (at least for now) current driver represented in a competitor's car.
Also can't help but notice that the minifigure podium kinda looks like a snow covered rock...
@SeparatorGuyChallis said:
"Tyrrel 6 wheel
Early Benetton Schumacher
Hamilton Merc
Lotus 79 in full JPS
etc"
How about a Big Mac?
The slightly widdened McLaren created for Nigel Mansells return to F1 lol
Eat your heart out, Znap car from RSoTD.
@marcuslf said:
"Also can't help but notice that the minifigure podium kinda looks like a snow covered rock..."
The funny thing about the minifigure base is that I am pretty sure the designer of the base in 10330 McLaren MP4/4 & Ayrton Senna had the podium from the 1991 Brazilian Grand Prix in mind as inspiration, so carrying it forward to the other sets seems a bit strange.
Here is that 1991 podium: https://medyascope.tv/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Fr-WHUmXoAI87-e-scaled-1.jpg
If you are worried about tobacco sponsorship in classic F1, like the JPS Lotus 79, I'd say it's moot as all three cars already released had tobacco sponsorship in some form. There is are nice after-market sticker options for the "naughty" logos anyway.
Bring on the Fittipaldi cars! Jackie Stewart's Tyrrell 003, How about anything Sterling Moss drove EVER!
@WokePope said:
"I know it's not a very "historic" car yet, but I'd KILL for an RB19 with proper Max Verstappen minifig.
One of the most dominant cars ever built with a GOATed driver? Absolutely fits the bill for an "icons" type line, even if the driver still happens to be actively racing. Everyone knows Max is going down an icon of the sport, and he's unlikely to ever match or top the success he had in 2023."
I am sorry, Your Holiness. I'm aggressively indifferent about F1, but I deeply loathe Verstappen. And since you have a direct line to the guy upstairs this probably counts as blasphemy, but let's be honest, that was never the real reason for me to go to hell anyway.
Can anyone who speaks F1 tell me why this set comes with a Fiat-sticker? And why is Michael Schumacher being played by Uncle Fester?
@Crux said:
"Can anyone who speaks F1 tell me why this set comes with a Fiat-sticker?"
Fiat had a stake in Ferrari in the 2000s.
I’d love a JPS Lotus but my preference would be the Lotus 77 rather than the 79. Because it’s the only F1 car I’ve ever sat in and likely the only one I ever will! Sadly I only remember this as a photo as I was about 6 months old at the time. Anything black and gold will be a day 1 purchase though.
So far I just have the Red 5.
Love it. Might even be a day 1 buy, although there are several March 1st contenders!
Couldn't care less about the width of the tyres, especially as the real difference is so miniscule. Might as well complain about the length of Michael Schumacher's legs - Lego don't do scale, they never have!
Since the difference in the width of the tyres at this scale is so marginal it seems a bit of a stretch to me to list this as a downside of the model in my humble opinion.
Agreed, Lotus with the black and gold JPS livery--replace the sponsor or whatever, but that color scheme is gorgeous. Plus it would be fun to see one in this scale with older curves.
Re the plaque: Honeycomb and carbon fibre… Did bees help build these? A carbon fibre honeycomb would be better phrasing.
This is my favourite F1 car, so I have to get this. It's just so amazing.
The wheels are not size-correct, but they do look gorgeous. And the same size makes them better for MOCs, in my opinion.
I think the size of the wheels is not a big issue in this set. I think it looks good.
@Khamsin said:
"If you are worried about tobacco sponsorship in classic F1, like the JPS Lotus 79, I'd say it's moot as all three cars already released had tobacco sponsorship in some form. There is are nice after-market sticker options for the "naughty" logos anyway.
Bring on the Fittipaldi cars! Jackie Stewart's Tyrrell 003, How about anything Sterling Moss drove EVER!"
Slot.It got around the advertising ban by producing a "Racing Porsche" 956 model. Handily the "Racing" sticker covered up and was applied on top of the "Rothmans" sticker, so could be removed.......
The review said:
"Thus, at the scale of 1:15 they should be 23.6 mm at the front and 25.3mm at the back. They are actually about 27mm, so it's not the rears that are inaccurate, but the fronts, which are too wide.
I know we harp on about this problem a lot here at Brickset, but it's all too common and, frankly, inexcusable nowadays. Would front tyres 4mm narrower than those at the back make a lot of difference to the overall appearance? Perhaps not, but for a model aiming for a high degree of accuracy and which it otherwise achieves, it's disappointing."
Soooo.....both front AND rear are both too wide. Front tires that would be 4 mm narrower would be less accurate. They should have been 1.7 mm narrower than the rears, which honestly would be such a small difference I bet many people wouldn't even notice, and would accidentally put the wider tires up front....
I don't care much for this particular car nor driver, but to me this easily the best of the three so far. The McLaren unfortunately has so many glaring issues (not just the wheels) but at least it had a good number of prints (even when some of those were an even bigger issue than the wheels....), the Williams is a lot better but not perfect either. This one gets pretty close. The increased price and the number of stickers are unfortunate, but might still pick one up once I see it with a good discount, for the sake of completion. The next one better not be a Lulu Mercedes ;-)
I would love to see Lewis Hamilton and the Mercedes F1 W11 car up next.
On a side note I would like to wish him luck for the forthcoming F1 season.
As always when you do something to please the most hardcore fans of anything, they are the ones that are hardest to please. You'd think they would be the ones most happy for such a thing, but because they know so much about the details of it they will find everything that's wrong about it. Just think about any movie about a subject matter you are into...
I'm certainly a fan of F1. I had my first stint of following it around the early 2000's and remember liking this car a lot, even though I have never had a particular thing for Ferrari or Schumacher. In fact, their dominance is probably what drove me away from the sport for about a decade. Getting to my point, for me this is a good enough model that I will certainly get it at some point.
I'm definitely into it enough to see the problem with the tire widths. For me it's, just as mentioned in the review, the fronts that look the most off. But they are still in a kind of acceptable range, unlike the McLaren which I haven't got for that exact reason. That one looks absolutely hideous. I would simply have to get another set of the Williams wheels to correct that, and that makes it too expensive for me to be worth it, doubling the cost.
The real F2004 looks very sleek to me, the cars were narrower at that time and this model doesn't really capture that I think. With narrower front tires, even just slightly, I think those proportions would come through better. But I also think the outside diameter of the tires look to be a little too big on the model, making the entire car look a bit more square and have less of that sleekness. I'm convinced they eye is unconsciously noticing the wheelbase of cars in terms of tire diameters in between the axles, so if the tires are too big the entire car looks too short. Another thing that could have been done to improve those proportions, I think, is add about a stud of length to the chassis between the front axle and the cockpit.
Overall though, it's close enough to be acceptable. Certainly from some angles it looks great. But as a hardcore fan, you always wonder how they could miss these things when it's so close to perfection and it wouldn't have made any difference in cost.
With regards to the wheel sizing, the scale difference in width between front and rear is actually less than 2 mm, not 4 as quoted in the review. If you look at a photo of this car from above you'll see that it's very much not the problem that everyone thinks it is.
@TheOriginalSimonB said:
"Re the plaque: Honeycomb and carbon fibre… Did bees help build these? A carbon fibre honeycomb would be better phrasing."
The honeycomb structure is actually aluminium. It's the material that fills the cavity between the inner and outer walls of the cockpit and crash structures. So the plaque should read "Aluminium honeycomb and carbon-fibre..." but I guess they went with that for brevity.
It's a shame this series has turned into dominant cars rather than celebrating the driver.
This is cool, and the wheel size doesn't bother me at all with this one. But for Schumacher, and given the era of the McLaren and Williams before it, I was really hoping for either a 1994 Benetton or even better, a 1991 Jordan!
I wonder what's next?
@Huw said:
" @Crux said:
"Can anyone who speaks F1 tell me why this set comes with a Fiat-sticker?"
Fiat had a stake in Ferrari in the 2000s.
"
Ferrari was part of the Fiat and then the FCA group but was sold 2015/2016. Some parts on Fiats and Ferraris were the same, such as the window buttons... so if you have a fiat from those years you can know what the Ferrari owners feel like when you open and close your windows...
Poor Micheal never got windows on his Ferrari though, lol
I don't have any real interest in this series, or F1 in general, but if they did a Alfa Romeo 158/159 Alfetta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa_Romeo_158/159_Alfetta) or a Lotus 18 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_18) or something else of that vintage, I might be interested.
@Huw re
“ The 7th was added after the 2004 Belgian Grand Prix, at which he secured the title with four races still to go.”
I don’t think this is correct. His helmets from before 2004 have 7 stars for example while he was at Benetton and his Ferrari helmets from before 2024.
My partner was a big F1 fan during the era the Icons sets have been from and feels quite strongly that if Lego don’t do an Alain Prost set to go with the current three it would feel like there was something (someone!) very, very important missing. They don’t have particularly strong feelings about which car. Maybe one of the McLaren MP4 types.
Meanwhile I don’t have any eras of F1 where I was much of a fan but Jim Clark and the Lotus 25 could be nice.
@BlackFalconBirdman said:
" @Huw said:
" @Crux said:
"Can anyone who speaks F1 tell me why this set comes with a Fiat-sticker?"
Fiat had a stake in Ferrari in the 2000s.
"
Ferrari was part of the Fiat and then the FCA group but was sold 2015/2016. Some parts on Fiats and Ferraris were the same, such as the window buttons... so if you have a fiat from those years you can know what the Ferrari owners feel like when you open and close your windows...
Poor Micheal never got windows on his Ferrari though, lol"
You'll never guess what Michael's company car back then was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ECecDRYnnA
@Hiratha said:
"My partner was a big F1 fan during the era the Icons sets have been from and feels quite strongly that if Lego don’t do an Alain Prost set to go with the current three it would feel like there was something (someone!) very, very important missing. They don’t have particularly strong feelings about which car. Maybe one of the McLaren MP4 types.
Meanwhile I don’t have any eras of F1 where I was much of a fan but Jim Clark and the Lotus 25 could be nice."
It's kinda ironic that Prost raced the MP4/4, and later the FW15C, which looked quite similar to the FW14B. To the point that Lego could easily have included stuff for alternate versions, especially with the McLaren.
I think Prost by now has become a somewhat underrated driver, despite his four titles he got. I saw a video some time ago where someone had recalculated the entire F1 history with the current points system (still with a bonus point for fastest lap), and while that resulted in suprisingly few major shifts when it comes to titles, Prost was the one big exception: If I remember correctly, he would have won 7 instead of 4!
@Hiratha said:
"My partner was a big F1 fan during the era the Icons sets have been from and feels quite strongly that if Lego don’t do an Alain Prost set to go with the current three it would feel like there was something (someone!) very, very important missing. They don’t have particularly strong feelings about which car. Maybe one of the McLaren MP4 types.
..."
I have to agree. He had most success driving for McLaren, so that would be fitting. But since there already is one made, I think it would be more interesting with something else. He also drove for Williams and Ferrari, both already represented as well. So then it would have to be Renault, the team at which he really established himself in the sport, and a manufacturer he was also involved with in various advisory roles very recently. He is also very french, just like Renault. Your move, Lego...
Prost was sacked by Ferrari for slagging off that season's car, so I doubt Ferrari would agree to a set with him in it.
As said already his titles were all won with McLaren and Williams so seems unlikely they would release a similar liveried Williams from the season after Mansell’s or one of the McLarens with similar Marlboro red and white livery to the Senna one.
On the other hand......it might give us some hope for another McLaren that solves all of the many flaws of the Senna one.
We can dream....
I’d love to see the 1993 MP4/8 if they did another McLaren from that era but they would need to get the nose right which they didn’t quite manage with the Mansell car. My favourite looking non-Schumacher F1 car.
(Yes I know Prost didn’t drive it.)