From Las Vegas to the awards stage: the story behind Allwyn's Scratch Car

Since it launched in November 2025, Allwyn's Scratch Car has been picking up awards, including a recent CIPR Excellence Award – recognition from one of the industry's most respected bodies for public relations. It's the latest addition to a list that now spans sponsorship, experiential marketing and live events: wins at the well-respected SBC Awards Europe, a PRCA DARE Gold, a 'Highly Commended' at the Campaign Experience Awards, and a Drum Marketing Awards finalist spot. 

Garnering praise from a variety of disciplines and judging panels, we take a look back at the campaign, how it came to be, and why it deserves the recognition it's gaining. 

Scratch Car was one of the first truly global creative campaigns to come out of Allwyn's growing relationship with McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team - a chance to show what that partnership can actually build when creativity, motorsport and fan engagement are given room to collide. As part of the first year of our partnership, it is proof of the scale of experience the partnership makes possible, and this is how close it can bring fans to the sport they love. 

The concept itself was simple enough to explain in a sentence, yet audacious enough to pique people's interest: a full-size model of a McLaren F1 car made entirely from scratch cards – the Allwyn X McLaren Scratch Car. While it was a world-first, it was also a natural expression of Allwyn's role as Official Lottery Partner of Formula 1 and Official Partner of McLaren F1 Team, transforming one of the most familiar symbols of our category into something fans had never experienced before. 

Unveiled by McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team Driver, Oscar Piastri on the LINQ Promenade during Las Vegas Grand Prix week, the car had  970 individually scratchable panels, giving lucky scratchers the chance to win a prize – from caps and signed merchandise up to the grand prize: a signed helmet and a trip to the McLaren Technology Centre ('MTC') in Woking. 

Fans who couldn't get to Vegas weren't left out; a parallel digital version let people scratch a digital McLaren car on social media, with its own trip to the MTC on offer as the top prize. 

Piastri, seeing the finished car for the first time, put it plainly: "It's a very unique concept, it's nice that you can actually scratch this car and it's a good thing. It's incredibly well done: it's life-sized, everything's in the right place. It's very, very cool." 

In typical Formula 1 fashion, this campaign was built at breakneck speed. From first idea to campaign launch day, the teams at Allwyn, McLaren Racing, creative agency VCCP and paper artist Florian Weber (otherwise known as PaperLegend) built this ambitious project in roughly four months. 

Weber, who hand-built the car panel by panel in McLaren's iconic papaya orange alongside Allwyn's trademark brand colours, understood the brief better than anyone: "F1 drivers have to be incredibly precise but also willing to take chances, and that's what makes the Scratch Car such a perfect embodiment of the feeling of winning. It's a piece of art that celebrates both precision and the thrill of taking a chance." 

Precision mattered in more ways than one. Building a full-scale F1 car almost entirely out of paper is a delicate enough task indoors – this one had to survive an outdoor launch in the Nevada desert. True to Vegas form, the weather brought surprises: rain moved in on launch morning, with the skies only clearing around thirty minutes before the car was due to be revealed.

Across Allwyn's own social channels, the campaign drew 21.2 million views and over 20,700 interactions, gaining more than 1,600 new followers along the way. McLaren's channels added a further 2.5+ million views and 1.8 million reach. 

The PR story was bigger still: coverage reached 1.408 billion people globally, generated across nearly 490 online articles and 50 broadcast features, with the story picked up by major motorsport and business titles alike. 

The recognition that's followed hasn't come from a single discipline; it's come from organisations celebrating excellence in public relations, sponsorship, experiential marketing and live events. That spread is arguably the most telling detail of all. A campaign doesn't win across that many categories by accident – it wins because the idea, the execution and the partnership behind it were all working in the same direction. 

Scratch Car was a demonstration of what Allwyn's partnership with McLaren Racing can deliver at global scale, and of what happens when bold creative thinking is matched with the execution to pull it off. The awards are a positive marker of that.