Over three days at the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, AAA's Fan Zone booth printed 3,000 personalized trading cards and handed them to fans in plastic sleeves. Snapmatic had run the same setup a few weeks earlier at the Grand Prix of Arlington, turning race fans into professional IndyCar drivers.
Client: AAA (Auto Club Enterprises)
Locations: Arlington, TX (Grand Prix of Arlington) & Long Beach, CA (Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach)
Date: March to April 2026
The challenge: standing out in the Fan Zone
AAA wanted a Fan Zone activation that went past a standard photo booth and gave fans something worth keeping, tied to its sponsorship of Team Penske. The brief came with four practical requirements:
- Accurate branding: the AI had to reproduce Team Penske fire suits, the specific IndyCar models and AAA's own brand marks.
- Location-specific creative: generic track backgrounds for Arlington, the palm-lined skyline for Long Beach.
- High-volume reliability, with thousands of fans expected and no room for delays at peak footfall.
- Data capture: a straightforward way to collect fan emails and cell numbers for post-event marketing.
The solution: "pro-driver" AI trading cards
We deployed a multi-booth setup running our custom AI trading card technology. Fans stepped into the AAA booth, had their photo taken and came out as professional IndyCar drivers. Getting the output right took close work with AAA: we trained the model to render the fire suits faithfully, keep the race gloves consistent, and reproduce logos such as the AAA collar mark in high fidelity. Motorsport branding is unforgiving that way, and it is the same accuracy problem we worked through on Lenovo's F1 activation. After the photo, fans scanned a QR code to enter their details, which unlocked the digital card and triggered a high-speed print. Each card came in a protective plastic sleeve.
The results
- 3,000 physical cards printed and handed out across the three-day show at Long Beach, triple the volume of previous activations.
- Thousands of unique fan records captured through the scan-and-save workflow.
- Queues stretched across the Fan Zone through the busiest periods.
- AAA's internal stakeholders, including the Chief Marketing Officer, used the digital-only link to share the experience across the wider organization.
Why it worked
The AI solved the costume problem. Fans did not need to dress up, because the fire suit and race car were applied digitally in seconds. Our four-person crew kept the line moving at peak footfall, and the plastic sleeves made each card feel like memorabilia rather than a flyer. The QR workflow did double duty, driving social sharing while meeting AAA's data-capture goals. It landed across all ages, and AAA members singled out the crew's patience with children and fans with special needs.
The same card format carries into very different rooms. Qlik's All-Star cards pulled live leaderboard scores at a data conference, and Visit Pittsburgh's cards at IMEX worked a trade show floor. At an IndyCar weekend the draw was simpler: fans wanted to see themselves in the suit.
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