Sepang 2026 · Stories
The Bricks Have a Theme Park in Johor
By Will Tygart · September 28, 2026
The LEGO set celebrating McLaren's 2025 title and the theme park in Johor share a name. For the kids in the Sepang grandstands, this one's personal.
LEGO has been a McLaren partner for years — the kind of partnership that makes perfect sense once you see it. Both brands are about precision engineering, obsessive detail, and things that click together exactly right. The latest proof: the 2026 Technic MCL39 set, a buildable celebration of McLaren's 2025 constructors' championship. Kids (and plenty of adults) all over the world are building that championship-winning car on their living room floors right now.
And some of those kids built their first sets in Johor.
LEGOLAND Malaysia opened on September 15, 2012, in Iskandar Puteri, Johor — the first LEGOLAND in Asia and only the sixth in the world. Fourteen years later, it's part of the furniture of Malaysian family life: the school-holiday trip, the first roller coaster, the Miniland skylines. For a generation of Malaysian kids, LEGO isn't a Danish import. It's the place in Johor where you spent your tenth birthday.
That's what makes this the family story of the series. Sepang's grandstands will be full of kids this weekend — the hillstands especially, where families spread out on the grass with the whole day in front of them. Some of those kids will have built the MCL39 at home. Some of them built their first Technic set after a trip to Iskandar Puteri. And now the two halves of that memory — the bricks and the race cars — show up on the same weekend, at the same circuit, on the same team.
I keep thinking about what this sport is for. It's for the engineering obsessives and the history nerds, sure — I've written plenty for them this week. But it's also for the eight-year-old on the hill with a Technic car in her backpack, watching the real thing go past at 300 km/h and understanding, in her bones, that somebody built that too. LEGO gets that. McLaren gets that. And Johor, quietly, has been in on it since 2012.