As many of you will have seen from our social media and the website itself, we recently completed a major project in collaboration with The Jockey Club – namely a large scale logo installation for long-term Cheltenham Festival sponsor, Magners Irish Cider. Here is how a world first for racing came about…
We presented our technology to The Jockey Club in July 2019 at their London Head Office and fair to say, we were immediately invigorated by their response. The discussion revealed genuine appetite for what our hosts referred to as “enabling new inventory” and the GroundWOW proposition was subsequently shared around their various regions.
It was unsurprisingly a good day at the office when the call came a couple of months later to see if we were interested to bring the technology to The Cheltenham Festival and collaborate with The Jockey Club for long term Festival sponsor, Magners Irish Cider. Our first visit to site in December 2019 brought home the sheer scale of the area in the middle of the race course but the GroundWOW business is founded on big ambitions and a plan to deliver for The Jockey Club was formed on the spot.
We revisited in January of this year and bad weather loomed large with named storms Ciara, Dennis, Ellen and Jorge on consecutive weekends. While we have formidable advanced technology on board, we haven’t yet developed the machine that walks on water! Given the immense weather related challenges, we were asked by the sponsor Magners to deliver their logo on artificial grass instead.
To be impactful, the logo needed to be created at scale (25m x 20m). That was a really exciting prospect for the team (all of whom enjoy a challenge!) and the logo was turned around in just a matter of hours with incredible levels of paint efficiency – a primary feature of our technology. The show-stopping installation was delivered to site in the week before The Festival and attracted incredible feedback as TV coverage beamed the Magners logo around the world. It was not just amazement that a project of this scale was even possible but also for many viewers, the fact that the logo had been created by an autonomous robotic ground printer, an absolute world first for racing.
While our primary business model is based on stadium owners operating their own machine, it was a huge honour to partner with The Jockey Club on a “project” and complete this installation for the headline sponsor. There is also learning in every job as there was in this one and the stellar feedback from The Jockey Club on our team’s approach to this task was the icing on the cake. The film below captures the spectacle perfectly and will serve as a great reminder of March 2020 when we made a little history of our own.