On Saturday, February 25, the Drone Racing League's marquee, season-ending championship is going down. Billed as "Miami 3-0-Fly," the league's Algorand World Championship season race features 12 of the best drone pilots in the world duking it out for glory.
"Miami is the perfect place for us to end our season," Nicholas Horbaczewski, founder and CEO of the Drone Racing League, tells New Times. "It's an incredible tech center and hot hub for exciting areas like blockchain. Its vibrancy is the right fit for an event like this."
According to Horbaczewski, the idea of the Drone Racing League (DRL) has gone from "a PowerPoint deck in 2015 to an event with a global, mainstream audience and tech-obsessed fans."
Often billed as "Gen Z's favorite sport," DRL now has more than 5.1 million followers on TikTok. In 2022, DRL says it reached more than 320 million households, many through its media partnerships with the likes of NBC, ESPN, and Fox Sports.
For the Miami event, confirmed pilots include 18-year-old French phenom Killian, Germany's Halowalker, Spain's Singu, and Los Angeles-based Vanover. Horbaczewski says the vision for the Miami event took approximately a year to perfect, and there will be a crew of 100-plus onsite for support, spanning audience experience representatives to media production folks.
Drone fans at the Race in the Cloud event in San Jose, California, on October 11, 2022
Drone Racing League photo
"What people don't expect is just how visually exciting all of this is," Horbaczewski adds. "It's all really loud, really fast, and there are a lot of crashes. It's an exciting experience to see the highest performance possible in the drone world. And, I will say that the course we built in LoanDepot Park it's like stepping into a real-life video game."
Format-wise, there will be three rounds of races. The first two rounds will feature six drone pilots each, with the top three in each round moving on to the six-pilot final round. Whoever wins the last round will be the day's champ and, perhaps, if they've accumulated enough DRL season points, the season winner, too.
The natural reaction for most folks experiencing this high-tech wizardry is wanting to get in on the action themselves. For that, there are ways to do so without breaking the bank.
"I would say come to the race, meet the pilots, snag an autograph, and then give a [Drone Racing League] simulator a shot," Horbaczewski says. "We do have games on Xbox [and] PlayStation, each showing you how to fly a racing drone. It's a difficult sport with a lot of crashes, but you can work on your skills."
Drone Racing League World Championship. 7:15 p.m. Saturday, February 25, at LoanDepot Park, 501 Marlins Way, Miami; thedroneracingleague.com. Tickets cost $25 via mlb.tickets.com.
