A League of Their Drones
Drone racing has amassed passionate fans around the world. These entrepreneurs now want to make it a mainstream sport.
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The countdown begins at 3, the numbers flashing above the seats of Sun Life Stadium, home of the Miami Dolphins. With house music pounding in the background, four quadcopter-drones peel off their starting blocks. The air grows thick with what sounds like a pack of industrial-size blenders.
Around a sharp turn and through a neon-colored, square gate, it’s Zoomas’ drone, lit up in purple, in the lead, followed closely by the drones of Rekrek, in blue, FlyingBear, in orange, and M0ke, in red. The drones, no bigger than a shoebox, nip at each other’s heels at speeds of more than 80 miles an hour. In the “cockpit,” where the four pilots are seated, beads of sweat glisten on Zoomas’ forearms; FlyingBear’s thumbs start to tremble.
Not seconds after the drones clear the first gate, Rekrek’s drone veers off course, clipping the wall and nosediving into the stadium seating below. He’s out. Then FlyingBear, making his approach to gate number three, takes his turn wide and slams into the right side of the square, blowing out the lighting and crushing the propellers on his drone. Now it’s down to two, and just as Zoomas — the pilot favored to win — zips down a smoke-filled concourse tunnel into the bowels of the stadium, he smashes his drone into a catering cart.
“Woah-ha-ho!” comes a commentator’s voice. “We have not seen him crash like that!”
“He’s up,” says the other play-by-play man.
“You’re kidding me!”
“He’s up!”
No damage to Zoomas’ drone, and he resumes his spot in first. Commentator number one chimes back in: “Lady Luck wearing a broad smile when it comes to Zoomas!” As Zoomas cruises into the finish box, fireworks explode, and a net catches his victorious drone. M0ke’s drone flies in seconds later. And then Nick Horbaczewski hits the space bar.
Horbaczewski is the mad scientist behind the slickly produced YouTube video playing on a laptop. He and I are on the 33rd floor of a building in lower Manhattan overlooking the Hudson and East rivers, the official headquarters of the Drone Racing League. The league is exactly what it sounds like: Top pilots from around the world racing four-rotored drone-copters on set courses, all competing for a chance to be the inaugural champion of the newest sport of the 21st century.
As founder and CEO, Horbaczewski is on a mission to make drone racing the Next Big Thing. Over the last two years, what began as hobbyists posting YouTube videos of recreational races on improvised courses has evolved into something resembling a legitimate sport, with household names and big purses for the best pilots. But the activity is grassroots, with annual competitions and one-off races popping up more or less at random. Horbaczewski wants to impose order on the madness by building yearlong competitions and a self-sustaining business model. The opening season kicked off with a race in Miami just before Christmas, followed by a race this month in Los Angeles. The final, sixth race of the year, tentatively scheduled for November, will mint the league’s first champion.
“My vision for this in the long-term is: This looks an awful lot like other long-term, professional race leagues,” says the 35-year-old Horbaczewski. “We’ll have media rights, sponsorships, licensees that want to license our products and sell them, and a whole host of other ways that this can be monetized. We’re building a sports league.”
A cascade of advance press has offered different takes on Horbaczewski’s vision: The Drone Racing League is the Formula 1 of drone racing, the NASCAR of drone racing, the natural successor to eSports, which is projected to make $175 million in revenue this year in the U.S. alone. If the production values on the DRL’s YouTube videos — with their flashing lights, thumping bass and overly caffeinated announcers — are any guide, this team wants nothing less than mainstream success. How to get this league ready for primetime, and who will watch, are the questions the DRL now faces.
When Horbaczewski first got hooked on drone racing, it looked nothing like the video he paused partway through.
In late 2014, he happened across a Motherboard video featuring a guy racing a drone on a snowy day in the Bronx. That man was Ryan Gury, an adrenaline junky who, after getting married a few years ago, had traded in his Ducati for a drone.
“When you have a black motorcycle in the city and you’re in your 20s, you don’t really ride it in a safe way,” Gury says. “But I saw somebody on the Internet fly a drone at speed with goggles and explain the feeling of speed.” He couldn’t get the video out of his mind, so he bought himself a drone and a matching headset. “As soon as you put the goggles on and fly it you really do forget that you’re on the ground. It’s weirdly immersive. It’s terrifying.”
Drones became his obsession. As he learned more about them, he realized that the pilots who flew fastest all did so by modifying their quadcopters. So in 2013, Gury, who had worked as a marketer and a manager of software teams, founded his own company, DroneKraft, to develop what he calls “performance” drones — drones straight from the box that go breathtakingly fast, no hacks required.
Horbaczewski, meanwhile, was serving as the chief revenue officer of Tough Mudder, the obstacle-laden running event for people who enjoy mud. During his time, Tough Mudder grew to more than 60 events worldwide and pulled in $100 million in revenue — not bad for a business that only expected to sell 500 tickets to its first event. (For the record, Tough Mudder ended up selling 4,500 to its first obstacle run.)
After stumbling across Gury’s drone video, Horbaczewski reached out and asked if they could meet. Over beers, Gury shared his vision for what drone racing could become: a true competitors’ sport, with a league and standard rules undergirding it. They drove out to Long Island, where Horbaczewski watched as Gury donned a pair of FPV, or first-person-view, goggles, giving Gury the sensation of flying from the perspective of the camera mounted to the front of his quadcopter. Gury went full throttle across an empty field. The drone buzzed around like an oversized fly — pretty cool, no doubt, but not yet the stuff of legend.
Then Horbaczewski had a go. Maneuvering the drone himself, the Tough Mudder executive immediately saw the potential of drone racing — the frightening but exhilarating feeling of unchecked speed that’s experienced hundreds of feet in the air, even as his feet were firmly on the ground. It was a moment of revelation for Horbaczewski, similar to how Rey realizes in Star Wars: The Force Awakens that she knows how to use the Force, even if she doesn’t understand exactly how she should wield it.
“I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen,” Horbaczewski says. “You had flashes of greatness. You knew the technology didn’t work that well, you couldn’t really see the drone. You were like: The concept of this is phenomenal; we need to put a lot of work into something that would meet the general public’s expectations for a sport like this. And that’s what we set out to do.”
The DRL’s offices are kitted out with all the trappings of a drone startup: bare white walls adorned with the skeletons of early versions of the league’s custom drones; papers and circuit boards strewn about; a bottle of Aultmore Scotch, adding the requisite dash of charm to a job where execs also do the grunt work. When I meet Horbaczewski here in early March, he is knocking out tasks for the league’s next drone race in LA: ensuring the camera crews and event personnel have the details; double-checking the design of the course; making sure the 12 pilots who will be racing in LA have their itineraries. Gury, meanwhile, is labeling and packing 120 GoPro cameras — one for each of the drones they’ll take to LA — which will record high-definition race footage from the drone’s point of view.
Horbaczewski is wearing a CrossFit Games t-shirt. (He’s into CrossFit.) His lunch is a quick meal of salad and a bottle of Perrier. It’s clear from the way he clutches his phone in his hand that he’s juggling many tasks, but he addresses me with perfect polish. None of it seems contrived, but still: This is a man, you say to yourself, who could sell a vegetarian a set of steak knives.
In drone racing, he tells me, he saw a natural successor to his Tough Mudder triumph. “I wanted to find another unusual niche sport and see if we could grow it into a global brand.” With Gury, he had found his answer.
Horbaczewski left Tough Mudder in January 2015 and began building the league from scratch. The first move was folding Gury’s company, DroneKraft, into the DRL. That resolved one issue — making sure all the pilots fly the same craft.
That only left a few dozen more problems. First up: how to turn drone racing into a spectator sport. With the quadcopters racing at 80 miles an hour, they could be hard to see, let alone tell apart. Gury’s solution was to build 100 LED lights directly into the body of the drone. Now the drones can glow different colors, as if they’re wearing jerseys.
Making sure pilots can fly without a hitch inside a football stadium was trickier. Radio-control drones like the ones the DRL uses typically fly using the standard 2.4 gigahertz radio frequency. On an open field, with no obstruction, this works. But with tunnels and concrete concourses to navigate, the signal could drop out. So now the DRL installs a custom cell network in each race venue, and every drone now contains an advanced radio. In Miami, for example, they figured out just how many drones could be airborne without interference from the stadium or other pilots’ flight controllers: four. That discovery also determined the size of each heat.
“We’ve designed and built these drones from the ground up,” says Horbaczewski. “The circuit board to the carbon fiber is all custom-designed and hand-assembled in-house.” They’re constantly refining them, and now pursuing a third-generation drone.
During a race, pilots get to use the drones for free. They cost between $500 and $1,000 each to manufacture — the league didn’t share the exact price — and during a single event Horbaczewski says they’ll burn through 120 of them. Technical difficulties on race day mean some drones might not respond to their controllers. And if pilots crash in one heat, the spare drones mean they can still fly in their next heat. For now, the DRL is paying for it all with the $8 million it raised last year from investors, including Matt Bellamy, lead singer of the band Muse — whose latest studio album is called Drones— and Stephen Ross, owner of the Miami Dolphins.
The league also covers the expenses of flying pilots out to the events and putting them up in hotel rooms. These professional drone-thletes — typically recruited by the DRL from YouTube videos — get paid to participate, though Horbaczewski declined to share how much. (He considers it a red herring. “The right question is, why do pilots fly?” he tells me. “Because they want to be a champion. Because we’re building the most elaborate race courses in the world, and it’s a chance for them to fly something they’ve never seen in their whole life.”)
Chris Haskins was already an experienced drone pilot from Idaho, having snagged first place at a race in Salt Lake City last October, when the DRL contacted him. Horbaczewski and his team had seen online videos of his races with Conrad Miller, a fellow drone pilot who also flew in the league’s Miami race. “They reached out to me, and once they started telling me about the venue, the level of how epic it was going to be — heck yes, I’m trying to get to any race I can,” says Haskins, who recently became a full-time R&D engineer at a Boise-based drone company called Thrust-UAV.
It’s also how Steele Davis, a drone pilot from the Atlanta area, became involved with the DRL. Davis flew in the league’s preseason event in New York last July. But since then, Davis’ opinion of the league has changed, and while he’s still listed as a pilot on the DRL’s website, it sounds like he’s not interested in competing in another DRL race. “I think what they’re trying to do as an idea is really cool and it would help the hobby, but how they’re going about it, I don’t necessarily agree with,” he says. “Nobody involved with the Drone Racing League is a pilot, and there’s nobody involved that’s part of the community, per se.”
In Davis’ view, a league has a duty to support the community of drone pilots, not merely tap into it for its own ends. It sounds a bit like a concern over authenticity, the rocky terrain that any underground activity must traverse on its way to mainstream popularity. “I don’t have anything against them,” he continues. “But I do have something against what they’re doing.”
When I ask Horbaczewski during my visit to DRL headquarters whether the league has received any pushback from the grassroots — pilots like Davis, who were already known from big races like last year’s U.S. National Drone Racing Championships, before any official league formed — he lets out a sigh, followed by a long pause.
“We definitely have had certain members of the community reach out and say, ‘Now millions of people know and care about drone racing. This used to be my thing.’ And that’s hard,” he says. “We get a lot of headlines, and some people say, ‘We’ve been doing this for years. Why don’t we get the headlines?’”
It’s a catch-22: The people who invested in drone racing as a hobby are the ones who made the idea of a league plausible in the first place, yet the company’s media moment, and a perception that it’s overtaking them, can be alienating. At the same time, an effective league is the very thing that could turn drone pilots, many of whom fly part-time on weekends, into professionals who can one day leave their day jobs behind. And to do that, the DRL needs to bring a nascent sport to millions of fans.
“There needs to be enough people to play this sport in order for it to be a sport, otherwise it’s just some weird, obscure hobby,” says Chris Thomas, founder of MultiGP, a drone racing league that helps local chapters of its U.S. league put on regional races. “As far as the Drone Racing League is concerned, it brings a lot of people into this sport who’ve never heard of it.”
But to make money — to turn this into a genuine NASCAR for drones — Horbaczewski has to figure out how to win over an audience. An audience of thousands of loyal, diehard fans, who buy your merch and tune in without fail every time new race footage drops on YouTube.
Given the importance of audience, perhaps the most surprising thing about the DRL’s take on drone racing is that their events are completely unattended. By design. There were no spectators in Miami, and the LA race — held inside an abandoned mall — is so secretive that Horbaczewski even asked that Backchannel not publish the exact dates of this month’s race, lest people show up. (It was held over the weekend.)
Part of the DRL’s concern is over the safety of fans, not to mention that if an errant drone crashed into someone’s face, the DRL would end up on a list of SportsCenter’s “Not Top 10” plays of the week. And before anyone shouts about the Federal Aviation Administration: All DRL drones are registered on the FAA’s new drone-registration website, but since all DRL races are held indoors, FAA oversight doesn’t apply.
But even the videos the DRL does release don’t feature every second of every heat of racing, a tacit admission that watching drones might be, well, boring — at least to the uninitiated.
So instead of hosting live events or broadcasting live, the DRL is controlling its image down to the last pixel. It rents out venues for two or three days at a time, and records footage of its races using more than 50 cameras, not including the GoPros mounted on every drone. The league’s videographer then massages that video into bite-size portions of the races, which it releases online weeks later. Short, fast-paced races give people a chance to talk about them and spread the word. By spinning many episodes out of one event, they increase the odds of reaching potential converts. It’s all very calculated.
The glossy videos try to tell a story about the pilots and their strategies. Pilots fly under nicknames, a holdover from the hobbyist drone community. A sideline reporter shoulders the burden of explaining the course and interviewing the pilots. Even the race names have been jazzed up: The Miami race became “Miami Lights” and the Los Angeles event became “L.A.Pocalypse.” The DRL anticipates that the most committed new fans will want to try out drone racing for themselves, so it created a downloadable race simulator. The simulator allows people, from the comfort of their keyboards, to fly the same Miami course the pilots flew.
A mastermind behind the DRL’s fan-acquisition strategy is Tony Budding, the DRL’s director of media. Horbaczewski and Budding have known each other since 2008, when they met through mutual friends. Last year Horbaczewski reached out, looking for advice on how to structure and market a new sport. Budding has experience there: An early executive of CrossFit, he was the co-director of the CrossFit Games, as well as the man responsible for putting the games on your TV.
“The biggest challenge in bringing a new sport to TV is making it immediately engaging without forcing the viewer to try and understand everything all at once,” says Budding. “It just needs to be immediately accessible and fun, and importantly, viewers will start to care when they like what they see.”
How that makes money so the league becomes a self-sustaining force that puts on race after race, year after year, is a question the DRL seems content on answering later. “It’s sponsorship, media rights, and licensing — that will be our business model,” Horbaczewski says. “When do those things kick in and how big are they? Those are questions for the future. Our whole goal is to build the sport and get it in front of people right now.”
After an audience is locked in, the DRL’s financial strategy could easily involve sponsors shellacking big banners up at DRL race events, or even sponsored teams that hire and develop pilots, similar to drivers’ teams in NASCAR. Some of this stuff is already happening. Horbaczewski can’t share details, but he says the league is in “serious conversations about content distribution deals.”
The league dropped at least one hint, though. Earlier this month the DRL uploaded the entire edited production of its race in Miami to its own Twitch channel. According to Ben Johnson, the league’s communications director, more than 100,000 people tuned in to watch the replay on March 7, the day it went up. Some of the comments streaming alongside the video indicated that the DRL is starting to hit its mark: “This is epic!” “The first person views give me motion sickness but I don’t care it’s worth it.” “Drone Racing > Bob Ross.”
Haskins, who also competed in the LA race last weekend, was surprised at his friends’ reaction to the Miami video. “I show it on my Facebook and Instagram and people are like, ‘Holy cow, how do I get into this?’ Even people that aren’t interested in flying.” With that level of enthusiasm, sponsorships and media rights might not be so far off.
As I wound down my visit in the days leading up to L.A.Pocalypse, Horbaczewski’s team was finalizing the layout of the course: rubble and falling buildings, plus a replica of the famous Hollywood sign. Horbaczewski is eager to see how his pilots and viewers react, although he’s confident that each Drone Racing League video will stick with new viewers the way his first drone flight did above that field on Long Island.
“This evokes from you that childhood joy of watching the Millennium Falcon fly through the center of the Death Star,” he says. “If it makes me feel that way, I bet it’s going to make a lot of other people feel that way, too.”
Photographs by Christian Hansen for Backchannel.
