Bricks, Bruises, and a Brilliant Cadillac: Building the Mattel Brick Shop NSX and Project GTP

Mattel has entered the chat. Not with die-cast cars this time (well, also with die-cast cars, but we'll get to that), but with the Mattel Brick Shop, their new line of buildable brick sets aimed squarely at car enthusiasts who've long looked at LEGO Speed Champions and thought "yes, but where's the NSX?" The answer, it turns out, was: Mattel had it all along.

I recently built two sets from the lineup: the '90 Acura NSX from the Elite Series, and the Cadillac Project GTP Hypercar from the Speed Series. The cars themselves are fascinating choices. The experience of building them? A mixed bag, though a charming one.

The Cars

The Cadillac Project GTP Hypercar debuted in 2022 with a futuristic design and serious performance credentials, built to compete in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It's a hybrid-powered machine, pairing a 5.5-litre V8 with an electric motor for around 670 horsepower. A Le Mans hypercar in brick form? Perfect choice to compare with LEGO Speed Champions line.

The NSX is equally compelling. The set lets you build either a Honda NSX or an Acura NSX, with both sets of emblems included, and you can go left-hand drive or right-hand drive, with US or Japanese licence plates. That's a genuinely thoughtful touch for a car with such a strong identity on both sides of the Pacific. The 1990 NSX is one of the great Japanese sports cars, and having it faithfully recreated in brick form, at 1:16 scale with opening doors, pop-up headlights, functional steering, and a matching 1:64 scale die-cast car included in the box is the kind of thing that makes car people very happy indeed.

The Cadillac is a more compact proposition: 236 pieces at 1:32 scale, with opening doors, a faithfully recreated aerofin, two sets of wheel covers, and its own matching die-cast Hot Wheels car.

The Build: Interesting, With Caveats

Here's where things get a little more complicated and where you'll start to notice that Mattel Brick Shop is not, and probably never claimed to be, LEGO.

The building experience is genuinely fun. The instructions are clear, the pieces are bagged by step, and both cars have enough going on structurally to keep you engaged. The bricks are made of smooth resin, designed to click together with ease, and in an ideal world, they do. But this is not always an ideal world.

The NSX, in particular, throws the occasional wobbly. Some pieces fit together loosely, others too tightly. You can tell there's a little more variance in the tolerance of the pieces compared to what you might be used to. Certain sections in the middle of the build required a worrying amount of persuasion to stay where they were put, though mercifully as the build progresses and more pieces lock into place, things do settle down and start holding together properly. Cold comfort in the moment, but comfort nonetheless.

The Cadillac is a smoother ride, partly because it's a smaller, simpler set. Fewer pieces means fewer opportunities for things to get wobbly, and the aggressive angles of the GTP Hypercar's bodywork actually translate quite well to brick form. The large rear wing, angular body panels, and signature vertical lighting accents all make it across to the miniature version with their dignity mostly intact.

The Finished Result: Something's Just… Off

And here is where I put my hands up and admit I cannot entirely put my finger on it.

Both cars, once complete, look good. They look like the cars they're supposed to be. The NSX has that low, wide silhouette. The Cadillac looks mean and purposeful. They both earn a spot on the shelf. And yet, sitting next to a LEGO set, there's something that feels slightly less resolved about them. Less coherent. Less finished.

I suspect it comes down to a combination of things. The slightly looser tolerances mean certain panel lines aren't quite as crisp. The overall construction, while imaginative in places, doesn't quite have LEGO's decades of refined language for how one brick should relate to another. And because the sets lean heavily on unique, car-specific moulded pieces rather than the ingenious reuse of standard bricks, the finished models can feel a little more like assembled components than built objects, if that distinction makes any sense at all.

The Verdict

The Mattel Brick Shop line is a genuinely promising newcomer to the brick-building space, and as a car enthusiast there is something quietly thrilling about having an NSX and a Le Mans hypercar sitting on the shelf that you built with your own hands. The subject choices are superb, the value is excellent, and the inclusion of a matching Hot Wheels die-cast in every box is a lovely little bonus that never stops feeling like a treat.

But if you're coming from years of LEGO builds, be prepared to recalibrate. The tolerances aren't as tight, some parts will test your patience, and the finished result, while undeniably cool, has an indefinable quality of not being quite as polished as the yellow brick from Billund. Mattel Brick Shop feels like a talented new driver who's very quick out of the box, but still has a lap or two of development work ahead of them.

If more similar sets come up that interest me, is a possible purchase. The remaining of the Mattel offering doesn't pull me in so far.