Meta
Trackside With Meta AI
- Meta
- Mssng Peces
- Meta
- Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team
- Digital experience design
- Immersive Build
- AI Systems
- Real-Time Show Control
The pit wall, pulled off the track.
Four days. Five seats. One pit wall. Thirty-two hours of continuous operation. A line that never stopped.
At the F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix, Meta and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team set out to give fans access to one of the most exclusive environments in motorsport: the pit wall, where races are won and lost.
Together with Mssng Peces, Reflektor turned that ambition into a physical and digital experience powered by Meta AI. Put fans as close to the action as possible without putting them on the track, and send them home with a video they couldn't wait to share.
Every Detail, To Scale
Inside the Mercedes-AMG Petronas fan experience at Aria, we built a full-scale, five-seat replica of the pit wall. Screens, headsets, radio equipment, materials, sightlines, all modeled on the real thing.
Fans dropped into a lap of the Bahrain Grand Prix with George Russell calling the car over team radio. Engines roared. Wind rushed past. The floor rumbled underneath them. For a few minutes, the Strip disappeared and race day took over.
The challenge wasn't just realism. It was making the experience intuitive, durable, and repeatable for thousands of fans across four intense days.
Two Minutes From Seat to Phone
Every participant left with something that wouldn't exist anywhere else. A personalized AI video of themselves at the edge of the track, face and hair blown back, the world streaking past, the kind of frame an F1 photographer might catch mid-qualifying lap.
Working with the Meta team, we trained a custom LoRA model from scratch using our own wind and lighting data. A photo captured at the station became a rendered video in under two minutes. Fans scanned a QR code on the way out and walked away with the asset already on their phone.
Over five thousand unique videos were generated during the run. A Hall of Fame wall played an approved loop of the best ones in real time, so the line outside could see what they were about to become.
Built to Run, Not to Demo
A hero video that plays beautifully for a minute is one problem. Five stations running back-to-back for four days, rebooting cleanly every morning, never dropping a guest, is a different animal.
We stress-tested the build for the worst day, not the best one. When the software showed strain after hours of continuous use, we rebuilt the way it handled each new guest so the experience stayed sharp from the first lap to the last.
When the hardware ran hot on some machines and not others, we tracked it to the operating system and fixed it across the fleet. And when the rig powered back up each morning, every screen landed exactly where it belonged, with no one touching a keyboard.
Four days. Zero downtime. Every fan got the full experience.
What we solved
- Continuous run without performance drift
- Consistent hardware behavior across every station
- Hands-off startup, every morning
- Full theatrical audio across all five seats
- Remote monitoring of the entire fleet
Designing Around the Wait
Meta AI's video generation typically returned in sixty to ninety seconds. Sometimes two minutes. Occasionally the API failed outright. Fine in a demo. Unacceptable with a hundred people in line.
So we engineered around it. While a fan's video generated, their station played curated content: stats, pit wall visuals, the drama of race day. If generation ran long, the experience cleanly handed the fan off to a brand ambassador with a tablet. The video kept generating in the background, then appeared on the ambassador's approval screen for download or the Hall of Fame wall.
A separate approval flow handled compliance for minors. Nothing reached the wall without a human saying yes. Nothing was lost, no matter how long the AI took.
Toto Showed Up. So Did the Line.
On Friday, Toto Wolff showed up to try it himself, which Meta AI and Aria pushed across Instagram, Facebook, and X. The line stretched across the Aria lobby for most of the weekend. Five thousand-plus videos went home in fans' camera rolls. A continuous loop of the best ones played on the Hall of Fame wall for the next person to watch, knowing they were minutes from being the next video on that screen.
Mercedes finished the weekend on the podium. The activation did too.
