How do you race a clock and call it a duel?
In air racing, pilots fly the course one at a time, against the clock. It's a feat of precision — but to a first-time viewer it can look like a single plane flying alone. The head-to-head, the thing that makes racing thrilling, happens only on the timing sheet.
Red Bull's challenge to Promotheus: make a new, unfamiliar sport instantly intuitive — and exciting — for a broad television audience.
Two runs, one sky — in real time.
Sandbox generated a real-time, data-driven "ghost plane": a competitor's run reconstructed and overlaid onto the live broadcast, so two pilots appear to fly the same course at the same moment. A head-to-head between, say, Yoshihide Muroya and Pete McLeod stopped being two separate stopwatch runs and became a side-by-side duel viewers could actually watch — over real venues from Abu Dhabi onward.
Around the ghost plane, Sandbox drove the broadcast's real-time graphics package — live gate timing, gaps, and on-air conditions like wind speed and aircraft speed — so the numbers that decide the race were on screen as it happened.
Abu Dhabi — live on-air WIND graphicAn unfamiliar sport, made watchable.
The ghost plane gave the broadcast a way to show competition that previously existed only in the numbers — an epic yet easy-to-follow viewing experience that became part of the signature look of the series.