The engines roar as the pilots pass through the final gate. To the screams of the spectators, the machines lurch around the hairpin bend and collide in a shower of sparks. A single pilot jumps out of his seat and removes his helmet, fist raised, claiming victory.
It’s not a Formula 1 race, not a movie or a video game, but a bit of all of that. The Drone Racing League (DRL), the international professional drone racing league, wants to make a name for itself by mixing sport and high technology. A discipline with a still quite limited audience, but which intends to continue its rise.
“DRL aspires to be the Formula 1 of the skies,” Ashley Ellefson, the organization’s director of operations, told Tech&Co during a visit to its facilities in New York. It is in this workshop where the league assembles and repairs its emblematic machines: the Racer4, the drone model used by all pilots during races.
A machine designed to combine speed and agility, in order to cut through the air as quickly as possible between the different gates of the circuits built in various stadiums around the world. Courses where pilots compete in groups of 6, testing their control of the machine as well as their reflexes – until a final winner is designated.
“The sport of the future”
A pretty standard principle. But one of the elements that makes this “sport of the future” special, in the words of Ashley Ellefson: the pilots wear glasses that emit images from a camera mounted on the drone. Enough to experience turns, accelerations, side by side and pileups as if they were piloting the drone from the inside. Strange sensations, which make “some see it as a video game in real life.”
Technology that makes drone racing “the sport of the high-tech generation,” proclaims Ashley Ellefson. It is logical, therefore, that such a discipline also organizes virtual races: the DRL has its own video game available on most platforms, “mainly developed as a training tool, and which we use to identify new pilots”. This cocktail makes it possible to attract new audiences: “More than 70% of our fans do not follow ‘classic’ sports”, emphasizes Ashley Ellefson.
Drone racing still doesn’t have the audience of unbeatable sports, but “last season broke all records,” exults Ashley Ellefson. During the 2022-2023 season, the DRL accumulated more than 260 million views on social networks last year, and the final organized in Miami attracted nearly 8,000 people.
A remarkable progression for a discipline inherited from wild practices, from organized amateur races in forests to aerobatics in abandoned buildings, filmed and broadcast on social media. Some of these pioneering videos were also filmed in France, notes Ashley Ellefson: “It was these videos that convinced me to join DRL to build the sport of the future.”
The league will launch its eighth season in the fall, wanting to focus on “big crowded events” weakened by the health crisis. Perhaps with a passage in France? DRL already organized a race at the Allianz Riviera in Nice in 2018, and one of the current drivers, Kilian, is from the Dordogne. “We are always ready to come back!”
Source: BFM TV
