The drone racing league simulator steam key12/16/2023 If someone wanted to break into the sport right now, all they’d have to do is download the official DRL simulator on Steam to get a feel for the current models the league has to offer. What makes the DRL one of the fastest growing leagues is its accessibility. “So one key part of my role is securing our venues and really working with different teams here to figure out where are we going, what would make for a great course for the pilots, what’s gonna look great on TV, where can we host audiences, and really balancing all of those factors, and so we look for unique venues that have their own character.” “We get a lot of inspiration from the venue itself,” Ellefson says. For example, some races will require navigating a certain distance, like last season’s event in Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, which featured racers chewing up space in a hurry as they made tight turns down hallways, racing down sidelines all while being challenged in all three dimensions of reality. We say this when we’re looking for new venues as well, imagine you’re a bird and where would be a cool place to fly in the venue, because they really can go places that you can’t with car racing or motorcycle racing, it is genuinely three-dimensional.”Įllefson, like Horbaczewski, came from Tough Mudder and is responsible for designing a lot of the courses for the races. “Playing around with how do we integrate the cars into the background, how do we leverage this very cool kind of bridge that goes down the middle of the venue, so how can we leverage that, put audience on, and feel like they are inside the course, which is not something we’ve been able to do elsewhere. “It’s just a really beautiful building,” says Ashley Ellefson, Director of Operations for DRL. One of the key patents that makes the DRL so unique is the advanced radio system which allows a drone to fly as far as a mile and a half away from its operator while feeding the driver real-time information through their FPV goggles. Twenty-six patents and 600 drones later, the group had a fleet of drones ready to fly. They’d build the drones up from the circuit boards, customizing them each step of the way. Rather than dealing with vendors, Horbaczewski and the crew cut out the middle man. “However, each time we put the parts together, we learned that there was no end to the ways the drones would fail, from barely lifting off to crashing immediately once up in the air.” DRL “When we were starting DRL, we spent months meeting with dozens of vendors and drone experts who recommended circuit boards, flight controllers, and other gear to help us develop high-speed racing quads,” Horbazewski says. Oh, and there was also the matter of trying to figure out how to produce drones. The company spent its infancy working out what cameras they were going to use to film everything, how to create an interesting product for mass consumption, and most of all, trying to find a market for what was a niche sport confined to Reddit and message boards. Getting the DRL off the ground was no different, and required taking an innovative approach. “I immediately saw the potential for the sport to grow into something bigger than it was, and we got to work on building out the technology, media and sports ecosystem required to professionalize drone racing and bring it to a global fan base.”Īny kind of startup would feature a myriad of challenges. “I was captivated by the speed and excitement,” Horbaczewski says. In fact, Horbaczewski was so captivated that he later bought DroneKraft. It took one meeting and a field test with a drone to dictate what Horbaczewski’s next move would be. Gury, prior to meeting with Horbaczewski, had been working on his own company called DroneKraft, in which working people could make their own high-performance drones, complete with first-person vision goggles. The desire to take that risk led Horbaczewski to a Home Depot with Ryan Gury, now the Director of Product for the Drones Racing League. It was those conversations that helped me realize that building DRL was a risk that I truly wanted to take.” “They’d start comparing the sport to Star Wars or their favorite video game from growing up and pitching ideas on how to develop it, what it could like, where the races could be held. “Whenever I’d talk to someone about the different startup concepts, their eyes would immediately light up when I mentioned drone racing,” Horbazewski says. In early 2015, Horbazewski left his job with the hopes of starting his own company. The Allianz Drone Racing League, which was drawn up during a meeting in a vacant lot behind a Home Depot in Long Island and now broadcasts to more 75 countries in just over three years, is one of those stories.Įnter Nicholas Horbaczewski, who before starting the league found success as the Chief Revenue Officer of Tough Mudder.
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