Inside the abandoned Hawthorne Plaza Mall in L.A., about 15 minutes from LAX, the buzz of drones echoed eerily through the 900,000-square-foot space. The cool cement and floor-to-ceiling nets—designed to catch errant drones—made the place feel like a dystopian war zone. Looters had their way with the mall during the 1992 Rodney King riots, and the place never bounced back, finally shuttering its doors in 1995. The concrete skeleton of a building has since been the scene for a few seedy Hollywood film sets, but has otherwise sat quiet and empty for the past 20 years. It’s a weird place, and the perfect venue for a drone race.
Two weeks ago, I was one of about 50 invited guests to watch the second official race of the newly formed Drone Racing League. The DRL—one of a handful of organizations attempting to fully professionalize the sport—officially launched in January this year, and has four additional races planned for 2016, including the World Championships. During a standard two-minute DRL race, as many as 12 pilots fly their drones through a course designed to test the ability of the pilot, all using the same DRL-issued drone. The pilots guide their aircraft through an aerial urban obstacle course of brightly lit fake subway cars, low archways, and hoops of neon, at speeds as high as 80 miles per hour.
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A year ago, when DRL founder Nick Horbaczewski told me about his plans to organize drone racing into a league sport, I wasn’t sure if it would actually happen. I’ve been on the drone beat, covering filmmaking, regulatory controversy, safety, and technological advances for the past year. From what I’d seen, drone racing was relatively unchartered territory—vast enough to make assembling a league a difficult task but new enough to lure investors.
“In the drone world, there’s a rush for people to think they’ve created the next big thing and to make a lot money doing it,” said Gary Mortimer, head of the site Small Unmanned Aerial Systems News and general drone enthusiast. He pointed to several other drone-racing organizations in the U.S. vying to lead the industry, like Rotor Sports, which hosts the U.S. National Drone Racing Championships, and Florida-based Multi GP. “The question is, who’s going to rise to the top? Which one will break through to make it big enough to fill the Super Bowl stadium?”
Mortimer thinks that any league, including the DRL, may take three or four years to develop before gaining a widespread audience. Horbaczewski and the DRL raised enough cash, Mortimer says, to handle the preliminary heavy lifting. To support the technology end, Horbaczewski brought in venture capital firms focused on early-stage tech companies, including RSE Ventures, owned by Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, for a reported $1 million in an initial round of startup funding. For media promotion, he partnered with the Creative Artists Agency and Hearst Ventures and enlisted.
But to make the DRL a viable sports entity, Horbaczewski will need to confront issues with filming the events, navigating federal airspace regulations, and connecting with viewers who know nothing about drones or racing them.
Last weekend, DRL pilots competed for prize money and were also paid upfront to race. (The DRL did not disclose pilot salaries, but will announce the payout for the upcoming world championships.) Before the first qualifying run, four pilots, all wearing their POV goggles, stood pensively inside the racecourse, shrouded by protective nets. A set of concrete highway barriers—and another veil of netting—separated the spectators from the pilots. As they prepared to compete, one man jumped up and down, hyping himself up for the race.
“This is a snowball rolling down hill,” Horbaczewski said only minutes before the first qualifying race of the day. “The goal of this—I don’t know if it’s a year or two years—but it’s thousands of screaming fans in an arena somewhere and a live TV broadcast of a sporting event that people care about. The road to get there has many steps.”
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Horbaczewski grew up in Boston. His first job out of Harvard undergrad was at a run-of-the-mill strategic consulting firm. After three years there, he co-founded a film production company that would eventually produce two mildly successful indie films (Some Girls and Addicted to Fresno). In 2006, he went back to Harvard for an MBA before starting his second company, Blauer Tactical Systems, an equipment and logistics provider for Homeland Security operations. Blauer was eventually acquired by the Virginia-based government defense contractor ADS, and Horbaczewski became, more or less, an international arms dealer—a role more suited for a James Bond character than a sports entrepreneur.
In 2013, Horbaczewski’s career zigzagged its way to Tough Mudder, the obstacle-course event company founded in 2009 by fellow Harvard MBA grad Will Dean. Tough Mudder was Horbaczewski’s introduction to a nascent sports league, which he helped grow from a weekend event into a full-on, global athletic competition.
“Tough Mudder was just this niche activity, and no one thought anyone was going to care about it,” he said.
When Horbaczewski joined Tough Mudder as chief revenue officer in 2013, the company hosted only a handful of events in the U.S. By the time he left two years later as senior VP of revenue and business development, half a million participants were entering 60 Tough Mudder events around the world and the company was making $100 million a year in sales. On his way out of Tough Mudder, Horbaczewski, in his mid thirties at the time, was hungry to start his third venture and was looking for another offbeat sports concept.
Horbaczewski first heard of drones in 2009, when he was working on a business school project and spoke to Chris Anderson, the former editor in chief of Wired and founder of drone maker 3D Robotics and the drone community site DIY Drones. Anderson’s early inspiration, coupled with a hobbyist community ripe for growth, led Horbaczewski to consider an official drone league.
“As soon as I saw it, I was like, this is really entertaining,” Horbaczewski said. “It’s really engaging, it touches on drones and tech, and it’s three-dimensional racing. It jumped out and had the potential to be something bigger than it is.”
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As drone racing got started, about four years ago, it had its glitches—mid-air collisions, broken radio reception between pilots and aircraft. Drones ended up in the netting, in the ceiling rafters, and splashed on the cement below.
“Drone racing itself isn’t out of that phase,” Horbaczewski said. “And the early days of drone racing were as much about building drones and wrestling with technical difficulties as they were about flying. But DRL is taking a fundamentally different approach.”
Even at the World Drone Prix last year in Dubai, where pilots competed for $1 million in purse money, drones crashed and technical issues made for long delays between races. The DRL, though, has tried to standardize the equipment and streamline the production logistics, all while working to build a receptive audience.
Filming the races is a key component to their marketability, said Mortimer. Remote-controlled plane and car racing failed to generate a widespread following, he said, because of a lack of footage suitable for broadcast. Thanks to cameras mounted on the nose of each drone—which serve as the pilots’ eyes—the audience gets a first-person POV glimpse into the action.
Since last July, DRL has been testing the technology needed to run and broadcast drone races in increasingly public venues, culminating in a Miami Lights event in December. Finally, in January, the league came out of stealth mode
“The number of views we got on our [Miami Lights event] content was in the tens of millions,” Horbaczewski said. “Our job over the next year is to convert those views into fans.”
A sports league needs fans, and one of Horbaczewski’s early challenges has been to help people understand the competition. To that end, he covered each drone in different colored LED lights. He made the races short, less than two minutes, and organized the competition into heats where pilots earn points toward a qualifying round.
Still, Mortimer says, the viewer experience is not fully dialed in. Seeing the drones as they circle the dark course at 80 miles per hour can be difficult. Flying larger aircraft, something that’s been considered, he says, runs the risk of getting caught up in red tape.
“All of this is flying against the face of regulation,” he said. “One of the ideas that’s began to bubble up is a super league, larger drones, but then they’re going to run into federal regulation.”
The Federal Aviation Administration lacks a comprehensive regulatory framework for drones—though the agency expects to publish such regs this summer—and drone racing didn’t exactly fit into the FAA paradigm at first. Horbaczewski met with FAA officials to clear the regulatory landscape for the DRL.
“If you’re going to work in a sport with these kind of regulatory and logistical challenges, you’d better be comfortable with it—I definitely learned it in that [government contracting] job,” he said. “One of the reasons we’re indoors is to make it easier [with FAA regulations].” FAA regulations, which prohibit pilots from controlling an aircraft through a point-of-view camera, do not cover indoor flying.
Finding insurance for the DRL presented another hurdle. In meetings with underwriters, Horbaczewski explained what the DRL was trying to do and presented safety plans for a reliable, insurable event.
“They’d hear the word ‘drone’ and then we’d say that we wanted to race them, and then we’d say we wanted to race them with a crowd there—people got pretty nervous,” he said.
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Around the world, drone pilots range in age from young—a 15-year-old British boy won the World Drone Prix (part of a different league) in Dubai—to early-onset balding. The DRL currently has about 20 pilots on its roster—MattyStuntz, NytFury, KittyCopter, and FlyingBear to name a few racers’ handles—though the list is constantly changing, and they’re all eager to become full-time DRLers.
“I’m a home-builder by day,” said Steve Zoumas (pilot name Zoomas), who won the Miami Lights event in January. “[Drone racing] was a hobby when I started, but now I’m seeing I can go further with it and make some real money. I don’t consider myself a professional, but other people do I think. I grew up on motocross and ATVs, and I get no bigger adrenaline rush than when flying a drone.”
As the DRL assembles its field of pilots, it’s working to make their jobs easier and encourage a higher level of competition. Last July’s pre-season event was essentially a training session for pilots. Since then, the league has issued its drones to pilots so they can familiarize themselves with the aircraft and invited them to fly race courses in advance. Horbaczewski ultimately wants to enroll the pilots in a full training season, prior to the competition circuit.
But a lot of things need to fall into place before any of that happens. Between future FAA regulations, competing racing leagues, and a general public unfamiliar with drone racing, the sport has a long list of obstacles to take on. On the immediate horizon for the DRL, however, are the four remaining races this year and then the World Championships.
“One of the things I didn’t have a deep appreciation for about professional sports is that pro sporting is like a planet,” Horbaczewski said.
“They need gravity. You need a critical mass of athletes and organizers, sponsors, broadcasters, fans—you need all these things to come together and become a self-sustaining cycle. You can’t have people getting paid to be an athlete in any sustainable way until you have all those other things in place.”