WhatsApp has given its race car emoji a makeover ahead of the upcoming Formula 1 Grand Prix. “Put all the race day energy into your chats with our redesigned race car emoji. Now you can rock the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 colors until Grand Prix weekend,” the company said on her channel.

WhatsApp’s racing car emoji now features a black car with cyan highlights. It was projected onto the Empire State Building in New York, as part of a partnership between WhatsApp and the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team.

The emoji shares timelines with Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement suggesting WhatsApp is reaching new highs in the US. In a post on his WhatsApp channel, the said CEO of Meta“We are seeing double-digit growth in messages and daily users on WhatsApp in the US.”

This comes days after Meta revealed the monthly active user count for its latest social media platform Threads. In a statement during Meta’s Q1 2024 earnings call, Zuckerberg said Threads now has over 150 million monthly active users, adding that it is estimated that over 3.2 billion people use at least one of Meta’s apps every day.

Speaking of WhatsApp, Meta (formerly Facebook) acquired the instant messaging app, founded by Brian Acton and Jan Kom, in 2014. Since then, Meta has tried to maintain WhatsApp’s initial position of not introducing advertisements into the app.

There were reports of ads coming to WhatsApp as early as last year, however, its head Will Cathcart denied them. Still, Meta managed to cash in on the instant messaging app by building a separate app and features for businesses.

In recent months, WhatsApp has increased its development speed and released new features for general users more frequently, including keys on iOS, group chat filter, video forward/rewind, and more.