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 the development of autonomous cars is that teaching road cars to take risks is unacceptable.

However, the race track is a decent place for a car to crash. You can take risks there, with every brutal stumble becoming a learning exercise. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a top racing driver without a few wrecks smoldering in their junior career records.)

That’s why 10,000 people flocked to Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Raceway to watch the first race of four driverless cars.

Testing Laboratory

The organizers of the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) event didn’t brief me on what to expect, so I wasn’t sure if we’d see a lot of car movement. Not because the project was likely to fail – there was definitely a lot of hardware and software engineering behind it, not to mention a lot of money. But creating a high-speed, well-maneuverable vehicle that makes decisions for itself is an immense challenge.

Just running a Super Formula car – a chassis modified for the series – is a big task for any racing team, even with a professional driver in the cockpit. I was prepared to be amazed if the teams came out of the pit lane without the engine going out.

But the cars were running. The lap times were not close to those of a human driver, nor were they competitive across the field, but the cars repeatedly lapped the course. Not every car could do fast laps, but the ones that did looked like real race cars driving on a race track. Even the size of the crashes showed that the teams found confidence and started to push the limits.

Is this the future of motorsport? Probably not. But it was an interesting test lab. After a year of development, six weeks of code-jam crunch, 14 days of practice and one event, teams return home with suitcases full of data and lessons to take into next year.

Track and cars

A2RL is one of three competitions organized by Aspire, the “technology transition pillar” of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council.

Yas is an artificial island built as a leisure attraction, with theme parks and hotels alongside the circuit, with influencer photo opportunities around every corner. The island has been the focus of the emirate itself, which has been transformed for tourism, and its facilities now play a secondary role to further rebrand as a technology hub. The F1 track now finds a second use as a testing laboratory and is probably the only track in the region that could afford the excess of two weeks of non-stop, illuminated robotic testing.

Although the initial ambition was to use Formula 1 cars to reflect Yas Marina’s purpose as a circuit, the cost compared to a Super Formula car was absurd. Additionally, it would require eight identical F1 chassis. Even in the days of F1’s unlimited budgets, few teams could afford so many chassis per season.

So Aspire’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) switched to manufacturer Dallara, which supplies almost every high-level single-seater chassis, including parts for some F1 cars, but also every IndyCar, Super Formula, Formula E, Formula 2 and Formula 3 car, plus a whole range of endurance prototypes. Dallara has also entered the 2021 Indy Autonomous Challenge through the IndyNXT chassis.

TII Abu Dhabi was also involved in the Indy Autonomous Challenge as part of the university team, so it saw cars quickly adapted for a robotic ‘driver’.