New drone racing league wants to be the next NASCAR

Competitive video gaming is a professional sport that generates more than $700 million a year, so why not drone racing?

That’s the bet Nick Horbaczewski is making by starting the Drone Racing League, with the backing of investors who include Stephen Ross, owner of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, and Lerer Hippeau Ventures, a New York venture capital firm.

Horbaczewski expects most fans to watch races online, much as they do competitive gaming in the United States, using their phones, computers — eventually even virtual-reality headsets.

Ultimately, he has ambitions of becoming a digital NASCAR for drones.

The nascent league hosted the first race of its inaugural season at Sun Life Stadium in Miami in December, shooting video of drones zooming around the giant complex from various perspectives, which will be turned into professional-quality content to be shown online in February. Their aim is to evoke classic Star Wars battle scenes and grab the attention of the mainstream public.

“We’re creating a whole new form of entertainment that straddles the digital and the real,” Horbaczewski said.

In the last two years, drone racing has grown from a niche hobby to more serious business. Fat Shark, a virtual-reality goggles maker, sponsored a racing event last summer at the California State Fair that attracted more than 100 racers. There’s also the International Drone Racing Association, based in Michigan and dedicated to setting up competitions and raising awareness of the sport.

This year, Dubai will host the first World Drone Prix, a tournament with speed and freestyle categories held by the IDRA and an organization supported by Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. In most of these events, the racers bring their own drones, and organizers depend heavily on sponsorships.

Drone racing shares a number of similarities with e-sports, the term for competitive video gaming, which lets fans watch their favorite gamers go head to head online and in stadiums. The e-sports market generated about $750 million in revenue last year, mostly from advertising and sponsorships, according to SuperData Research, which tracks the gaming market.

Horbaczewski is chasing a similar model. For now, he is focused on well-produced video content to be consumed on browsers and mobile devices, including ones that put the viewer in the pilot’s seat. The startup is working on agreements with distributors to get the videos from the Miami event and beyond before more eyeballs, though Horbaczewski declined to name them.

The Drone Racing League is unique in that it designs and builds drones for use in its races, standardizing the equipment and reducing costs for pilots. That way, they only have to worry about navigating the drones, similar to a professional race car driver. Each drone costs a couple hundred dollars to assemble, Horbaczewksi said.

Drone racers fly quadcopters, aircraft with four propellers. The controller has two joysticks and resembles a video game console. Often, pilots wear virtual-reality goggles that receive a feed from the camera embedded on the drone and maneuver as if they were in the craft itself.

At the Miami event, pilots sat near the sidelines just off midfield, with their drones starting from a pad above their heads. The lit-up course, about a half-mile long, started out with a lap around the stadium near the pedestrian tunnels on the first level.

The drones, moving as fast as 80 to 90 mph, hit a couple of brightly lit checkpoints akin to those you’d see in a video game and then dove into a 10-foot-wide tunnel. They eventually popped out through another tunnel and got a blast of fresh air before doing a sharp 180 into another tunnel leading to the concourse known as the helix. The pilots had to maneuver through twists and turns to get back to the stadium into a green-lit box for the final landing.

Pilots receive a score based on the checkpoints they hit and how fast they finished the course in each heat — they can get points even if they crash and don’t finish.

This story was originally published January 29, 2016 at 3:19 PM with the headline "New drone racing league wants to be the next NASCAR."