Rival Road
VW
To highlight the rivalry between the turbocharged Volkswagen Golf GTI and Jetta GLI, we created Rival Road. First, an interactive game you could play on desktop and mobile. Second, an RC car live stream experience you could watch on Twitch. And finally, the winner triumphed and received, once-in-a-lifetime experience at Fastivus — a premier Volkswagen enthusiast event held in Southern California.
On July 26th and 27th, we brought the video game to life on Twitch. The nation’s six best RC car drivers were drafted to Team GTI and GLI, captained by Volkswagen Andretti Motorsports drivers Tanner Foust and Scott Speed. Teams spent 11 hours driving custom-built RC cars on the Rival Road track.
But this was no ordinary track… The 1,800 square foot course was rigged with 16 unforgiving turns and 5 custom-built obstacles. Obstacles were 3D modeled then prototyped to full-scale versions, constructed, and installed into the track.
While the track was visually impressive, the hardware team showed their true ingenuity in developing RC models of the Volkswagen product. Starting from stock CAD models, industrial designers modified the models to match the GTI and GLI real-life cars, while making the same accommodations for external and safety parts as stock car racing — replacing windows and lights with sticker replicas and removing breakable parts. These revised models were then converted into models for 3D printing, printed in pieces, and re-assembled. The ‘master’ prints were polished, molded in silicone, and recast in a high-temperature epoxy to be vacuum-formed as shells for the RC cars. After forming, the PETG shells were cut from their sheet, painted, and detailed to look like the real cars and attached to durable, fast, professional RC racing cars for the drivers to use and abuse. We ended up turning out 2 brand new shells every hour and finished more than 50 shells for the event.
