Will Drone Racing Be the Next Big Niche Betting Sport?

Fifteen years ago, drones were not something most of the public knew about. Today, they have such widespread use that these small aerial craft, whose primary job is to provide footage of things they fly over, are well known by all. When most people hear the word drone, they instantly think of quadcopters, a device with four rotors. That is so because most commercial drones are such devices. Yet, a drone is technically any non-human-piloted craft, meaning any aviation device that gets flown remotely. Most of the military kind are very plane-like in appearance, and they are high-end aerial vehicles, equipped with infrared cameras, and laser rangefinders, flying at super high speeds.

What is interesting about quadcopters is that even though many see them as a fairly new invention, the first one was created in 1907 by brothers Louis and Jacques Breguet. Yet, it was not until 2006 that their non-military purposes got recognized, and the Federal Aviation Administration, or the FAA, allowed the sale of commercial drone permits.

Nowadays, many young people own drones for their content-making endeavors. In 2016, DJI’s Phantom 4 introduced machine learning and computer vision tech, allowing the device to navigate obstacles on its own and reach faraway destinations using GPS signals.

In 2011, drone owners discovered they could use their devices for another type of entertainment – racing. That fad originally began in Germany and has spread elsewhere. The activity got such a global reach that in 2021, the famed US fantasy sports provider and sportsbook DraftKings began accepting bets on drone races. Now, this is something many other gambling operators are considering.

What Is Drone Racing?

This gets classified as a motorsport. It is one where competitors usually operate quadcopter drones, customarily wearing FPV goggles, which are head displays. The drones not only race to see which one is the fastest but also complete obstacle courses with varying degrees of difficulty. Whoever completes their course the quickest is the winner.

So, for the most part, this is first-person racing, thanks to the mentioned technology, which facilitates streaming from a drone’s camera to a person’s headset, pilots see what is in front of the drone as they try to navigate the course as swiftly as possible using a remote control.

Naturally, given that all drones are not the same, the races get categorized into classes, based on the power, propeller, and wheelbase of the drones involved. The most publicized competition from this arena is the DRL or the Drone Racing League, founded in the US in 2015, but also operates internationally. Its events have been broadcast on ESPN, Fox Sports, Sky Sports, NBC Sports, and various other top sports media services. In 2019, the DRL also launched its AIRR circuit, an AI-powered one, an autonomous drone racing championship. Thus, things are continuously evolving in this landscape.

Lastly, we should note in this section that the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, or World Air Sports Federation, is the governing body for drone racing, as it is for virtually all air sports, including ballooning, gliding, parachuting, and so on. This is a non-profit based in Lausanne, Switzerland, but it was established back in 1905 in Paris, France.

The Current Drone Betting Landscape

Aside from DraftKings experimenting with featuring drone racing as a sport for gambling fun, we have heard that Betway and Pinnacle have also tried their hand at offering markets on competitions where drones move through obstacle courses, but we could not confirm this. Still, it is expected for this sport to see a betting explosion soon in the gambling industry, as the racing drone market was valued at $900 million in 2023 and is expected to grow by a compound growth rate of 22.1% in the next six years. Thus, given its rising popularity, it should be no shock if its competitions become sportsbook mainstays.

At the start, when DraftKings initially formed their DRL partnership, they only offered markets on win/loss outcomes and head-to-head matchups. In essence, that was a pilot program to see what kind of feedback they would get from users, and if drone racing is worth featuring at all. Now, some sportsbook solution providers that have included drone racing in their arsenal have taken some markets from Formula 1 racing and included them for drone competitions, such as fastest lap, podium finish, total crashes, and so on. Team-based bets have also been a featured prop, allowing gamblers to wager on team performance, and not just how individual pilots do in a competition.

For many, the visually dynamic nature of drone racing is what sets apart this modern sport from the rest of the offerings at online sportsbooks. It is more in line with tech-savvy crowds. Platforms like Twitch and YouTube, via their live streams, have also given this competition type increased accessibility and greater fan engagement than what other novel sports can hope for. Of course, this has greatly helped fuel betting interest in it, especially from those already into eSports wagering and betting on virtual sports.

Challenges for Drone Race Betting

The main one is the lack of standardized regulation among leagues, making it difficult for software providers to make markets for drone racing, as different leagues can have different rules. Given its relative freshness, drone racing does not have strict competition conditions that all races, everywhere, must follow. The lack of such universal guidelines makes it hard for this tech sport to gain wide acceptance within the gambling sector, as operators may not be clear if a drone malfunction in one competition will result in the same ruling/outcome in another. That creates confusion about how markets will work and is not worth the hassle for many software solution suppliers to add drone racing to their pre-packaged sportsbook products.

There is also the issue of ensuring fair competition, as competitors can easily modify their drones, unsuspectingly (in many cases) boosting their capabilities or exploiting various technical advantages. Operators also struggle to collect accurate data in races, even with modern tracking systems. Races have too encountered drone malfunctions on account of different external factors, such as signal interference, and these can significantly affect race results, sometimes unfairly so.

We also have the problem of bookmakers not knowing how to accurately set odds for drone racing gambling markets, as there is not enough race history data for bookies to know how to do this precisely, even with the use of advanced software right now. The technical nature of racing can confuse casual bettors, further limiting the already narrow mainstream appeal this sport has.

So, lots of challenges to drone race wagering exist, and we just have to wait and see how regulatory bodies and gambling operators navigate these, and what kind of worldwide acceptance this competition type will receive in the years to come. Will its projected growth really come to fruition, and will this realm expand to a point where most bookmakers simply cannot ignore it anymore? We will just have to wait and see.

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