- Agency: Pixion
- Client: PISTA
- Category: App Design — Sports & Leisure
- Location: Zagreb, Croatia
- Project Brief: Design a mobile app that delivers synchronized race starts, precision GNSS tracking, and real-time race data for a seamless competitive driving experience.
A sports and leisure app built for racers lives or dies in one moment: whether two drivers actually launch at the same instant. Pista settles that moment with software instead of hand signals, syncing both phones' clocks to fractions of a second and firing a shared countdown so both cars start together.
Racing enthusiasts have always had a discovery problem, because a stopwatch can time your run but can't tell you who else is out there tonight. Pista opens on a live, map-based view of nearby racers, so a driver sees who is active and sends an invite without a group chat or any prior connection.
The manual start is where every informal race breaks down. Three honks or a dropped hand never land together, so the finish turns into an argument instead of a result. Pista resolves the clock drift between the two phones first, then runs one shared countdown, which pulls start skew from roughly 200 milliseconds down to about 20 and makes the time worth trusting.
Phone GPS is too coarse for a race decided by inches. Pista pairs with an external GNSS device that samples at 25 Hz and around 10 cm precision, about 25 times the data and 10 times the accuracy of the 1 Hz, 1.5-meter signal a handset gives you. That is the gap between a clean trace and a guess at a tight finish, and it keeps deltas consistent across sessions and devices.
Isolated results kill the reason to compete, since a personal best means nothing if you can't stack it against anyone. Verified profiles gather each driver's win-loss record, an Elo-style rating, and recent head-to-heads in one place, so a time carries weight the moment it lands.
Not every night comes with a live opponent, so Pista builds for solo runs too. Any recorded run becomes a ghost you can chase, whether it belongs to a rival or to your own fastest lap, with live deltas marking exactly where you gain or lose ground down the strip.
The whole app supports one behavior end to end: find a rival, start fair, and compare with confidence. A cross-platform React Native build ships the same experience to iOS and Android, so the person you want to race never has to be holding the same phone you are.
Client Testimonial
"Pixion owned Pista end to end, from the first workshop to launch, and made it feel easy. They drove product, design, and engineering as one team, communicated clearly, and delivered exactly when it mattered. If you want a partner who truly builds with you, choose Pixion."
— Matej Majstorović, Co-Founder @ Pista
Results & Impact
Head-to-head racing, finally done right. A clean path from finding rivals to reviewing shared results cuts the friction at the start and the doubt at the finish, so the competition holds up and the outcome sticks.
- 25x more data: 25 Hz sampling versus 1 Hz
- 10x more accurate: about 0.15 m versus 1.5 m
- Roughly 90% less start skew: about 200 ms down to about 20 ms
