Coronavirus cases have been spiking in parts of the U.S. over the past few weeks. This has caused the pause of NBA and MLB hopes for seasons to start up and putting doubts about whether college and NFL football will start in the fall. Even the Father’s Day race at Talladega was rescheduled for Monday, because of bad weather, but the concerns about that race were certainly still on people’s minds. One company, though, believes that they have built the next great race car and found the perfect birth place for the debut.
According to ladbible.com, Airspeeder has been working on developing cars that use drones to hover the body of a Formula 1 race car above ground. They see this as the future of Formula 1 racing but no doubt also the future of all car racing. Airspeeder also believes they have found the perfect place for these flying car races to take place: Australia, specifically South Australia (ladbible.com 1). With miles of dessert land, they believe that this is the best place to have a race track and have the future of racing take its first flight.
Matt Pearson of Airspeeder has this to say about the future of racing and why getting into the air in South Australia is the right move:
“Australia’s been a great place to test drones, even Google and Amazon have chosen Australia for their test programs because of fairly advanced regulations. There’s an opportunity now for Australia to do that for the urban air mobility market, air taxis and flying cars. Le Mans, Bathurst, Monaco, there are these amazing places where we’ve seen the birth of new sports. This is such a great place for us to basically create that next iconic place for racing“
Matt Pearson of Airspeeder
A New Style Of Racing And A New Continent
The video below shows the test flights of the first F1 cars in real flight speeds.
While it is cool to see something that larger being lifted up into the sky and fly around, I’m missing the racing part of all this. There’s no cut out for an actual person to be inside one of these to fly it. I assume that means its being controlled on land by someone with a big remote control. And it doesn’t seem to be going very fast so I don’t see where the adrenaline rush will be coming in for drivers and fans. Seems more like just a big drone flying through the dessert.
Pearson does explain how these are not just the future of racing but also the future of flying vehicles and how safe they are:
“A helicopter has thousands of moving parts, and a single point of failure which makes them very expensive to maintain. An air taxi has about 16 moving parts and about half of those are redundant, so it’s a very safe, very stable platform. Taxis are a great thing to do with this technology, but we also think that there’s a great place to fuel innovation in racing.”
Matt Pearson of Airspeeder
Is this the future of racing? I don’t think so. Is this the future of flying cars? I believe so. Provided the drones can hold not only the weight of the vehicle itself but also passengers, just like cars on the ground. I do think this could be the start of a new form of racing. The chassis are the same size as F1 race cars and though manned on the ground, could mean getting a new kind of racing fans excited about this. There is definite potential here to create a new branch of racing in a new part of the world that will go down in history and be remembered, just like Monaco and other places around the world are. The future is bright and continuing to look to the sky, where anything is possible. Keep staying safe everyone!
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