WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

In the future our sports events could be dominated by robot and drone warriors battling it out for supremacy, and at some point this could present companies with a new market opportunity.

Later this week, the world’s first autonomous race car company Roborace will make history by sending their fully electric, autonomous car which is also sponsored by Nvidia who are trying to push the sport, and their tech, to pound around the racetrack at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK, and I’m going to be there on Friday to see it first hand.

Once there Roborace hopes the car will perform a lot better than just okay, and help to establish both the car and the brand as a for real racing series in the eyes of the assembled motoring elite.

The teaser trailer

“We are excited that Lord March has invited us to make history at Goodwood in this attempt to be the first to face the climb to the hill in a completely autonomous way, using exclusively artificial intelligence,” says Lucas di Grassi, the Formula E championship driver and ambitious CEO of Roborace.

The three day event will also let Roborace fans able to experience the Hillclimb from “inside” of the car by using Roborace’s Virtual Reality (VR) software, and experience that promises to get fans closer to the racing action than anything else before it. And who knows, perhaps one day you could be the one controlling it as it speed through S-curves on the track – all from the comfort of your own home.

As for the racing purists though there is an argument to be had that watching a finely tuned racing machine, albeit one of the world’s most advanced, calculate the perfect racing line and follow it around a circuit isn’t as exciting as watching a human driver push closer and closer to the edge trying to find that perfect line. However, that said, who knows, one day Roborace will spice the races up by racing their cars head to head with Yamaha’s autonomous MotoGP robot which has been built with the help of the world famous Valentino “The Doctor” Rossi, and which in the next couple of years could surpass even the famous Doctor on the track…

Racing purists look away now.