Making Blackberry stand out in a crowded iPhone market.

Blackberry was launching its first ever touch screen phone to go head to head with iPhone. Without the marketing budget to match - how could we get headlines across the tech world.

The idea was to leverage Vodafone and Blackberry’s 10 minutes of time with Lewis Hamilton in a story that the internet could get behind.

So, the story goes like this, two tech geeks who figured out how to hack a Blackberry Storm to control their R/C F1 car caught McLaren’s attention. The McLaren team thought, “Why not take this idea to the extreme?”

They invited the duo to McLaren’s test track in Portugal, where they’d hacked their own F1 car, basically turning it into the world’s fastest (and priciest) R/C toy.

Of course, the whole thing was too tempting for the 2008 F1 Driver’s Champion, who couldn’t resist taking it for a spin—steering with nothing but the phone’s accelerometer.