A YouTuber Is 3D Printing a Full-Size F1 Car and Planning to Drift It

Australian YouTuber Mike Lake is doing something that sounds impossible until you see the progress. He is 3D printing a full-size 2026 Formula 1 car, planning to power it with a Mercedes M120 V12, and then he intends to drift it.

The main body shell is already assembled. It took 100 separate print jobs, each averaging around 10 hours on Bambu Lab H2S machines running PETG. The front wing alone consumed roughly 175 hours of print time and about nine kilograms of plastic, which came to around $158 USD in raw material. The whole shell required over 500 hours of printing so far.

None of the pieces fit on a single printer bed, so the team at Two Step Garage sliced the geometry into numbered sections and printed them in batches. Assembly took two full days, with Lake plastic-welding each piece and reinforcing every seam with Loctite 406. At one point he spent three hours looking for a missing part before realizing it was already installed. It was number five. It was right there.

The chassis was designed with help from Cage Kits Australia and built to accommodate the M120, the naturally aspirated V12 that powered early Pagani Zondas. The engine has already passed a compression test. Fitting a V12 with a transaxle gearbox into a 2026 F1 silhouette required custom everything. There are no off-the-shelf parts and no instruction manual for this kind of conversion.

The exhaust setup is equally custom. Lake is building a 12-into-1 collector to route the V12 output through the side pod exit, which apparently leaves about five inches of clearance. The air scoop above the driver will function as a real intake, feeding the V12 individual throttle bodies. His stated goal is a car that looks like a 2026 F1 car and sounds like a 1990s racing machine.

The front wing detaches with a dowel-and-bolt system for trailer transport, which solves a real problem given the car length. Weight distribution is still being worked out. The V12 and transaxle sit at the rear, leaving the nose relatively light. Removing the front wing during transit shifts weight forward on the trailer and probably helps with stability.

STL files for the build are available through Two Step Garage if anyone else wants to try. Most people will probably just watch. Whether a 3D-printed PETG body survives a track day with a V12 behind the driver remains to be seen. Lake seems confident. Whether it survives drifting is a separate question entirely.