How to run a brand activation across the Formula 1 season

A sponsor's logo is on the car, the pit wall and the drivers' overalls. So is everyone else's. By the time a fan reaches your stand in the fan zone, they have already walked past a dozen brands competing for the same photo and the same thirty seconds of attention. The question most agencies bring us is a plain one: what do you actually hand a fan that they keep?

Formula 1 makes that question harder than most events. The calendar runs to roughly 24 races across five continents in a single season, from Melbourne and Suzuka to Miami, Monaco, Silverstone, Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi. A sponsor activating the whole season plans the same experience in a dozen countries, in front of crowds who each expect it to feel local to them.

How companies are running F1 activations

The range on show at a Grand Prix is huge, and most of it is built to be experienced once. PUMA and Ferrari turned a historic Milan tram into a rolling 20-minute fan experience through the city ahead of the 2025 Monza race, the PUMA Tifosi Tram. Formula 1 has taken the whole grid into a city centre, as it did when all ten teams filled Trafalgar Square for F1 Live London in front of a six-figure crowd. ExxonMobil works the hospitality end, with VIP guest experiences, driver Q&As and on-track access for partners across the season. And as official partner of the British Grand Prix, Santander built an interactive stand at Silverstone, a replica F1-car sofa and games that pitched fans against real drivers.

We sit inside that mix: a personalised collectable the fan takes home, so the brand keeps travelling long after the stand comes down.

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Three very different rooms at the same race

Each Grand Prix weekend gives you three activation environments, and they barely resemble one another. The trackside fan zone is high-volume and fast: families, long queues, short patience. The F1 Fan Festival takes the sport into a city centre, often days before the cars arrive, with foot traffic that never bought a ticket. Paddock Club hospitality sits at the opposite end, a small VIP room where the guest expects something considered rather than something quick.

An activation that works in all three has to flex without a rebuild. What you deploy trackside for throughput does not belong in a hospitality suite, even when the underlying idea is the same.

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Put the fan in the car

The activation that travels well at a Grand Prix borrows the sport's own visual language. A guest steps up, has their photo taken, and the AI image generates in about 30 seconds. Photo to printed collectable runs end to end in around a minute 45, and the guest walks away with a card that places them in the cockpit: team livery around them, the sponsor's logo rendered on the sleeve and the bodywork at print quality. It reads as motorsport rather than a generic filter. If you want the mechanics of the card format itself, we cover them in our guide to AI driver cards.

The sponsor branding is the part that has to be right at every race. Logos sit where the brand team approved them, at the correct proportion, legible on the print in the display case and on the digital file the guest shares. Nothing is left to a fan's phone filter or a stranger's editing app.

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Evidence it holds up at race scale

When Paramount+ activated at the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Austin in October 2023, the booth drew a steady queue across the weekend. Demand was strong enough that the activation was extended to Mexico City the following weekend, and the two events together produced 6,522 unique AI portraits with agency partner Velocity. That is the pattern worth noting: an activation designed for one race that earned a second because fans kept lining up.

Motorsport prints at volume too. At the Grand Prix of Long Beach, our AAA fan-zone activation produced more than 3,000 personalised cards across three days, over a thousand a day, with the crew keeping pace with the queue.

The same booth has run for Lenovo’s F1 activation and across F1 hospitality suites, the fast trackside end and the premium end of the same weekend.

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Deploying the same idea across a dozen countries

Multi-race delivery is a logistics problem before it is a creative one. For the fan zone we run a staffed kiosk with on-site printing, so a crew handles the queue and the guest leaves with a physical card. For the Fan Festival or an overflow crowd, a mobile-first BYOD route works better: fans scan a QR code, use their own phone, and receive the digital file with no printer on the stand. Plenty of sponsors run both at the same race, staffed for the keepsake and BYOD for reach.

Data handling is the line that reassures a brand's legal team. Guest photos are processed to generate the collectable and then deleted after the event. There is no lingering face database to account for across nine different jurisdictions.

Frequently asked questions

How long does each guest take?

The AI image generates in about 30 seconds, and the full photo-to-printed-card workflow runs end to end in around 1m 45s, all on-site.

Can the cards match a specific team’s livery and our sponsor branding?

Yes. The look is built from the sport’s own cars and colours, with your logo placed to a brand-approved brief and legible on both the printed card and the shared file.

Does it work trackside as well as in hospitality?

One approach covers all three environments at a Grand Prix, the trackside fan zone, the Fan Festival and Paddock Club, flexing crew and setup while the guest experience stays the same.

Can you run it across a whole season?

Yes. We run a staffed kiosk with on-site printing for fan zones and a mobile BYOD route for Fan Festival reach, deployed the same way across a dozen countries.

What happens to guests’ photos?

They are processed to generate the collectable and then deleted after the event, so there is no lingering face database to account for across different jurisdictions.

Planning your own activation? See our AI photo booth and AI trading cards.

Why to lock this in early

The season's marquee races sell their sponsorship inventory a long way out, and the Fan Festival dates are published well ahead. If you are targeting a specific Grand Prix, the useful decision now is which of the three environments you are activating in, because that choice drives crew size, print volume and the branding sign-off timeline more than anything else. A Paddock Club plan and a fan-zone plan are different builds.

Tell us which races you are looking at and how you want fans to leave the stand, and we will map the staffing, throughput and sponsor-logo approval for each one. Get in touch and we will put a plan against your calendar.