I read an interesting piece about drone racing and people who want to make more of this type of events than just backyard fun. And that sounds cool.

From the disused locations to the fact that they decorate the location and encourage racers to be “aggressive”, it all adds up to an interesting racing experience that we have only seen in games or movies.

Here’s a quote from the article:

Horbaczewski has a taste for spectacle. The LA course was decorated with ominous props — decaying freeway signs and ersatz piles of rusted metal — and he’d rigged the scoring to reward aggressiveness. The league had brought 10 drones for each participant, and he urged his pilots to push the aircraft to the limit. “I tell them if you don’t crash, you’re not racing hard enough,” he said.

I love the fact that they take abandoned buildings and complexes and turn them into racetracks. You can find them in almost every city so the course is not a problem.

When I was reading the article I immediately remembered I’ve seen this type of racing before: the movie Death Race and the games Carmageddon and Roll Cage: aggressive racing (deadly sometimes), powerups and vehicles crashing.

Here’s a clip from Death Race:

It is not hard to add powerups on the track and get the drones to react to activating or getting hit by one. Remember Anki Overdrive?

If they can keep delivering the excitement and add to this the possibility to attend via live streaming then yes, I think it does have a future.

You can read the full article here.