Lap of Legends used real-time data to make the world’s first-ever real-vs.-virtual F1 race possible — all while moving at 200 mph on live TV.

Logan Sargeant drove his car on the iconic Silverstone Circuit in a race against AR-based avatars of his childhood racing heroes who taught him the joy of racing. We conveyed Logan’s physical movements to the virtual avatars via real-time data, giving the avatars the data that would then inform their driving response.

Breaking the boundaries of sports and reminding F1 fans of the joy that inspired their love of the sport.

Each F1 race today feels like an existential battle between drivers trying to keep a spot in the league. TV shows about F1 are given names like Drive to Survive for a reason.

As the pressure gets more daunting, drivers are opening up about their struggles with the high-stakes intensity of racing culture.

Especially Logan Sargeant. He’s the first American F1 driver in 30 years. It’s one of the highest honors in racing today, but it also comes with even higher stakes in a hyper-competitive league like F1.

Beyond Logan, the fans and media feel this undercurrent of negativity in F1 too.

So as the league works to alleviate this pressure, we aim to rekindle the joy that shaped F1 racing in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Competition never ends in the beer category. Millions of dollars get spent each year to cut through the noise. To grow sales and market share, you need to consistently be top of mind in culture.

So, with cultural relevance as our key objective, we set out to address another pressing issue in sports culture: the overwhelming pressure that F1 drivers face today.

Our brief became to remind everyone who loves the world’s fastest-growing sport — F1 racing — that joy is an essential component of the sport, and of an active lifestyle in general.

In the first-ever real-vs-virtual car race — featuring AR avatars of racing legends like Mario Andretti, Jacques Villeneuve, Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell, Jenson Button, and Damon Hill, driven by AI — Logan Sargeant, a young F1 driver, raced his F1 heroes from his youth.

This historic race aired live on TV, like a traditional F1 race.

Reminding fans and drivers of the joy that got them into F1 in the first place; a joy that is more powerful than the win-or-retire mentality making F1 racing so toxic today for drivers, fans, and journalists.

And we did it all through AR, AI machine learning, and telemetry, using tech to quite literally change the game of F1 racing and create the first sporting event that spanned different dimensions of reality.

A Made-for-TV Story with Extensive Promo: This unprecedented F1 race materialized as an unprecedented television program. Fans first caught a glimpse of it at the United States Grand Prix in October 2023, and at premiere events in New York and Miami in early 2024. Then, the full program aired on AMC and BBC America in spring 2024, interspersed with stories of Logan’s journey as a driver, adding a level of personal narrative that no other race has offered. Soon, the full program featuring the race and the human story behind it will also be available to stream on-demand via AMC, BBC America, and Roku.

A Feat of Boundary-Breaking Technology: With the help of real-time data, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, machine learning, and telemetry, Logan raced in his car on a track — like he normally would — at Silverstone, home of the British Grand Prix. But his digitized opponents appeared as augmented reality avatars in his racing helmet, responding to his driving motions in real time with the help of machine learning, which processed real-time data from multi-constellation race-grade GPS systems to understand Logan’s motions, getting his location down to the centimeter. This technology is so precise and true to racing physics that F1 teams have started using it themselves to model and test new racing strategies.