The Saudi Arabian Grand Prix is one of the most watched sporting events on the planet. For the 2025 edition, the brief was simple on paper and monumental in execution: build a fan zone that could absorb 100,000 visitors across a race weekend, keep them engaged between sessions, and make the Jeddah Corniche Circuit feel like the most exciting place on Earth.
The brief behind the build
Our Activations and Production studios were engaged six months before race weekend. The scope covered spatial theming across 14 zones, a gamification layer that connected to the in-venue LED infrastructure, live entertainment programming, and full crowd management for the public fan village.
What makes F1 environments uniquely demanding is the layering. You're designing for casual fans who've never watched a race live, for hardcore enthusiasts who know every technical detail, for families, for VIP guests, and for broadcast cameras simultaneously. Every sight-line matters. Every queue matters. Every second of downtime between on-track sessions is an opportunity — or a failure.
How we solved the spatial problem
The Corniche site gave us an 80,000 sqm footprint across multiple zones with different access credentials. Rather than designing each zone independently, we developed a single spatial narrative: the journey from the outer public zones to the paddock-adjacent premium areas mirrors the journey of an F1 car from factory floor to race day.
This gave us a consistent visual language — a progression from raw industrial materials and motion graphics at the entry to precision, luxury, and immersion at the premium tier. Wayfinding became part of the experience rather than an afterthought.
Gamification at scale
Our Tech studio built a custom engagement layer that used QR wristbands to connect fans to a real-time leaderboard. Completing activation challenges — from reaction tests at the driver reflex station to pit stop simulations — accumulated points that were visible on the main LED ribbon across the fan village.
Over the three-day weekend, 34,000 unique fans registered on the platform. The reaction time station alone generated 11,000 sessions. The leaderboard drove return visits — fans came back on day two to improve their score.
What race weekend taught us
No amount of planning survives first contact with 35,000 fans arriving simultaneously in a two-hour window. Our Production team had deployed a dynamic flow management system that rerouted ingress across three secondary entry paths the moment our live dashboard showed primary queues hitting threshold. Average wait time across the weekend: under nine minutes.
The data we collected on dwell time, zone occupancy, and engagement depth has already shaped how we approach the 2026 brief. Events at this scale generate more usable insight per square metre than any other format we work in.
