The car met F1 talent and one team’s misfortune meant victory for the TUM team from Monaco. After a week of preparation and many laps of the track, the first A2RL teams arrived at the event they had been waiting for: the first race of a brand new extreme form of motorsport.
In the run-up, teams raced around the circuit as quickly as their meticulous codes of ones and zeros would allow, preparing their driverless cars for the competition. Keeping an eye on the track, it wasn’t uncommon to see (and hear) self-driving cars whizzing down Yas Marina’s main straight, as each team honed their technology ahead of the main event.
On the big day, the circuit was a hive of activity. A Fanzone set up with games, VR and displays dedicated to the race welcomed over 10,000 enthusiastic fans, all eager to witness a slice of history. As anticipation for the race grew, the grandstands on the starting straight filled with excited spectators: men, women, children, it doesn’t matter who you are, the A2RL welcomed you.
As the sun set, former F1 driver Daniil Kvyat entertained the crowd by taking laps in a human-driven version of A2RL’s Dallara-branded Super Formula car, and then showing what Dallara’s supercar, the Stradale, could do in track. They both looked really perfect.
Kvyat wasn’t just there to enjoy a track session, but to participate in the first of the evening’s events: Man vs Machine. Here he would take on the A2RL’s home team, TII racing, to demonstrate the difference between a human-driven car and an autonomous machine. The TII car is the most advanced autonomous vehicle around, having been in development since the series’ genesis. While putting on a show, Kvyat demonstrated that, for the moment, man still has the upper hand over machines. At least for now.
Speaking after the event, Kvyat commented: “It’s a great engineering innovation. To see these cars running at a respectable pace is impressive. Sharing the track together, even if we’ve just tried to carefully co-exist, knowing that there will be no risk useless, it’s very important. Competition, in the end, is what drives progress.”
From there, it was time to compete. Of the eight teams from the United Arab Emirates, China, Singapore, Germany, Hungary, Italy and the United States, the Italian teams PoliMOVE and Unimore and the German TUM and Constructor (also representing Switzerland) qualified for the final of the night race four cars. There have never been more than two autonomous cars competing on a track, and the world’s stage was set to see who would make history and take the top step.
The cars posted times of around two minutes before the race. While a human can take a faster lap in the same car, qualifying showed that a car can drive autonomously and without incident (mostly) on the Yas Marina circuit. When it came to the race, for the first half the four teams played well with each other – the aim of the A2RL races is to make driverless cars behave like human-driven ones: overtaking, shuddering and spinning are part of the game – and the PoliMOVE team was trying to earn the checkered flag.
Well, it was until disaster struck on the fifth lap of the eight-man final. The green Italian car stopped, then turned towards the wall, but fortunately did not crash into it. This stopped the race and all cars returned to the pits to restart and complete the remaining three laps.
Unfortunately, the PoliMOVE team car did not return to the track. In his absence, compatriots from the Unimore team were in the lead … until their car suffered a similar fate to that of the PoliMOVE team and stopped suddenly. The race was not stopped this time and the German team TUM took victory with a last-lap overtake, taking the lion’s share of the $2.25 million prize pool and their place in the history books as the first winner in absolute of the A2RL. The compatriots of the Constructor team placed second, while the Unimore team took third.
The race may not have gone perfectly to plan, but for a period of time there were four cars driving around the Yas Marina circuit with no people at the wheel. As for the starts, it was a solid foundation to build on, and the preparation for the 2025 event begins now.
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