When Hot Wheels’ 2024 Legends Tour Comes to Town, We Are All Kids Again

As an adult, there are very few things that can still give you that feeling you had as a kid in the toy aisle, leafing through the Hot Wheels blister packs. The power tools section at your local home improvement store is maybe the nearest thing. But if you’re lucky, and patient, you may just have the opportunity to check out the Hot Wheels Legends Tour Presented by Mobil 1.

The tour has been around since 2018, and each of its stops are a bit like your standard cars and coffee gathering. Here, there’s a twist: The Legends Tour is aimed squarely at the kind of car person who never outgrew their love of flashy, ostentatious custom builds. When it stopped in Dearborn, Michigan, last weekend, you could see a police-liveried seventh-gen Dodge Charger ute conversion, a slammed VW Type 1 Beetle, and a life-size recreation of Hot Wheels’ legendary Larry Wood-designed Bone Shaker hot rod without so much as turning your head.

In the strictest sense, the Hot Wheels Legends Tour is an international competition in which custom cars compete to become the newest addition to Hot Wheels’ line of miniature-scale toy cars. A winner is chosen at each stop of the tour, which covers the U.S., Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil, and those winners advance to the Semi Finals. In reality, the Hot Wheels Legends Tour is more than a contest. It’s a celebration of our freedom to customize, an outlet for individual self-expression, and a vibrant, life-size homage to every young car fan’s favorite line of toys.

Dimon Diesel, whose car won the Michigan leg of the 2024 tour, summed up the spirit of the event perfectly.

“I hate when you go to a car show and they’re like, ‘You can’t touch my car. Get your kid,’ and everyone acts like sticklers,” he says. “So we were like, ‘Let’s open the doors up. Let’s let kids get pictures of it. Let’s everyone have fun with it, because that’s what made someone like me get into cars.’”

The participants are eager to spread their enthusiasm and to allow an equally imaginative audience to experience their cars. Their excitement is infectious, and it goes a long way toward getting everyone on board with the truly awesome range of different builds they’re liable to see. From vintage Firebirds and classic hot rods to gray-market imports and lifted pickups, this stop of the tour proved that Metro Detroit’s car scene is as broad and diverse as its population. Spend enough time here, and there’s very little you’ll miss.

How does a Hot Wheels design judge select one “best” from such a wide array of different machines? For Eric Han, a regular judge and a Hot Wheels designer, authenticity is key.

“My personal drill is to have a conversation with the owner, and the first question I ask is, ‘How did this car come to this version that we see here today?” Han says. He’ll then ask for the story behind the car, looking for a special connection between the builder and their creation. “I think that brings a little more story and authenticity.” Through these stories, Han will discover features or custom touches that an owner may have done as an homage to something special to them. Those kinds of details, he says, “separate them from the rest of the crowd.”

Eric Han has been with Mattel since 2013, spending the last eight or so years at Hot Wheels, where he currently serves as the lead designer for die-cast design. A graduate of Detroit’s Center for Creative Studies, Han today works out of Mattel’s offices in El Segundo, California. Over the years, he’s developed a keen eye for what works in a scale die-cast car.

“I try to talk to almost everyone here, every show, but I usually limit my picks to three or four finalists and I spend a little more time talking to them and asking them about details here and there,” Han says. “I don’t know if I can make [the model] in four parts or five parts, but let’s say four. Four parts? How would this get broken up? Can [Mattel] even do this? If the car’s got a paint or a wrap on it, can we translate this into [a die-cast]?

It isn’t easy to faithfully miniaturize a car, Han explains. “We have to consider a lot of things like parts [to be] created, color, material.” However, as challenging as it can be to turn a car into a diecast, Hot Wheels has never had to say “no” to a Legends car because it was impossible to produce. “We are getting to that point where technology is really good, almost scary good. It’s up to the designers and their capabilities, but so far we haven’t had any miss out on it.”

As for Han’s favorite part of judging Hot Wheels Legends Tour stops?

“Meeting the fans and the enthusiasts… I want to see the people. I want to see what they’re like. That way I get a little more influence and inspiration than I would normally do in my practice. That usually leads to good things. I’ll take cues from this person or that person… I’ll bring the cool things that I see and I’ll put those into my design or I’ll use them as a reference.”

A stop on the Hot Wheels Legends Tour is a car event unlike anything else. If you didn’t make it to the Dearborn tour stop this year, don’t fret: from here, the tour’s U.S. stops include Chicago (July 27), followed by Indianapolis (August 10), Dallas (September 7), Houston (September 14), and Phoenix (September 28), before rounding out the 2024 circuit with a final stop in El Segundo on October 5. Winners from each of these tour stops will duke it out in Semi-Final and Final rounds, with submissions from multiple countries around the globe, to produce a single winning car that will be forever immortalized as a Hot Wheels miniature.

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