Driverless racing is real, terrifying and strangely exciting

ABU DHABI – We live in strange times for autonomous vehicles. Ambitions come and go, but truly autonomous cars are further away than solid-state vehicle batteries. Part of the problem with developing autonomous cars is that teaching road cars to take risks is unacceptable.

However, the racetrack is a suitable place for a possible car accident. You can take risks there, with every brutal crunch becoming a learning exercise. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a top racing driver without a few scraps smoldering in their junior career records.)

That’s why 10,000 people descended on Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Raceway to watch the first four-car race without drivers.

Test laboratory

The organizers of the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) event didn’t let me know what to expect, so I wasn’t sure if we’d see much car traffic. Not because the project was likely to fail—there was certainly a lot of hardware and software engineering behind it, not to mention a lot of money. But creating a high-speed, highly maneuverable vehicle that makes its choices is a huge challenge.

Just driving a Super Formula car – a chassis modified for the series – is a big task for any racing team, even with an experienced driver in the cockpit. I was ready to be impressed if the teams came out of the pit lane without the engine stopping.

But the cars were moving. The lap times weren’t close to that of a human driver or competitive in the field, but the cars repeatedly covered the track. Not every car could do fast laps, but the ones that did looked like real race cars being driven on a race track. Even the size of the crashes showed that teams are finding the confidence to start pushing the boundaries.

Is this the future of motorsports? Probably not. But it was an interesting test lab. After a year of development, six weeks of code development, 14 days of practice and one event, teams go home with suitcases full of data and lessons they can use in the year ahead.

The track and the cars

The A2RL is one of three competitions run by Aspire, the “technology transition pillar” of the Abu Dhabi Advanced Technology Council.

Yas is a man-made island built as a leisure attraction, housing theme parks and runway hotels, with influencer photo opportunities around every corner. The island has been at the center of the emirate’s restyling for tourism, and its facilities are now playing a secondary role to another rebrand as a technology hub. The F1 circuit now finds a second use as a testing laboratory and is probably the only circuit in the region that can afford the excess of two weeks of round-the-clock, floodlit, robotic testing.

Although the early ambition was to use Formula One cars to reflect Yas Marina’s purpose as a track, the cost compared to a Super Formula car was absurd. Plus it would have required eight identical F1 chassis. Even in the days of unlimited F1 budgets, few teams could afford so many chassis in one season.

So Aspire’s Technological Innovation Institute (TII) went to manufacturer Dallara, which supplies almost every high-level single-seater chassis, including parts from some F1 cars, but also every IndyCar, Super Formula, Formula E, Formula 2 and Formula 3 cars plus a full range of endurance prototypes. Dallara is also participating in the 2021 Indy Autonomous Challenge via the IndyNXT chassis.

TII Abu Dhabi also took part in the Indy Autonomous Challenge as part of the university’s team, so it got to see how the cars were quickly adapted to take on a robotic ‘driver’.