We’ve seen amazing drone footage before. But when you throw in a World Championship-winning Formula 1 driver with a custom, ultra-fast drone, and you have something exceptional. Red Bull, a brand that is always pushing boundaries, has just released amazing footage of Max Verstappen’s new F1 car., and it was all filmed by a custom-made drone.
The drone was designed by a Dutch team called Dutch Drone Gods, with the help of Red Bull’s Advanced Technologies arm. Their goal was to make a drone that was not only capable of filming a race car, but one that could keep up with the car as well. In a development time frame that took over a year, new lightweight aerodynamic materials and parts were developed to achieve weight savings of 10 per cent. Trial run tests done on F1 tracks with real race cars showed the team just how quick this new drone they developed was.
Amazingly, the drone was manually piloted by Dutch Drone Gods’ own Ralph Hogenbirk, a.k.a Shaggy FPV. Red Bull says Hogenbirk faced a unique challenge with the piloting requirements for the drone.
The Pilot is navigating the drone’s flight route with a radio controller, observing the flight path only through FPV goggles transmitting low-resolution drone’s eye view. The camera angle is then adjusted simultaneously with a foot pedal, requiring precision in hand-to-eye coordination to deliver a smooth close-up shot of an F1 car going over 300 km/h – completely new challenge for the pilot.
The result of the team’s work was a drone that is faster than an F1 car, if you can believe it. Red Bull says the drone is capable of accelerating two times faster than an F1 car. This means this drone can hit 186 mph in just four seconds before going on to reach a top speed of over 217 mph.
But all this performance comes at the expense of battery life. Red Bull says the average consumer drone can fly for 30 minutes, but that’s at speeds of just under 40 mph with far less agility. Red Bull’s drone had a battery life of around three minutes.
Hogenbirk says this shoot was special because the drone was so fast and it was a challenge trying to keep up with an F1 car. “This was definitely the craziest shoot I’ve done so far,” he says. Even Verstappen himself noted how much of a challenge it had to have been flying behind him.
“For the pilot there are a lot of things that you need to take into account, for example avoiding bridges and to anticipate our braking points, as we have a brake pedal but in the air it works differently. So, it’s very stressful I think to be that focussed,” Verstappen said. Challenging sure, but it all makes for some cool ass footage. Hopefully, this drone is used to film more motorsports action.