https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/dr ... -exciting/
That's why 10,000 people descended on the Yas Marina race track in Abu Dhabi to watch the first four-car driverless race.
Just running a Super Formula car—the chassis modified for the series—is a big task for any race team, even with an expert driver in the cockpit. I was ready to be impressed if teams got out of the pit lane without the engine stalling.
But the cars did run. Lap times weren't close to those of a human driver or competitive across the field, but the cars did repeatedly negotiate the track. Not every car was able to do quick laps, but the ones that did looked like actual race cars being driven on a race track. Even the size of the crashes showed that the teams were finding the confidence to begin pushing limits.
A2RL had one of the key characteristics of any motorsport: It was deeply unfair. Three teams arrived with a wealth of expertise in autonomous racing: TUM, Unimore, and Polimove.
Polimove beat TUM and Unimore to the Indy Autonomous Challenge prize, and TUM and Polimove were involved in Roborace, an early forerunner to A2RL. Unimore also has a direct partnership with TII via its Indy Autonomous Challenge bid.
Another team, Constructor, from a private university of the same name in Bremen, Germany, won Roborace’s Season Beta. Although the series never progressed beyond test events that ranged from endearingly baffling to outright dysfunctional, Constructor beat the house team by several thousand points.
The fastest team in pre-qualifying, Polimove, set a lap time of 1 minute, 57.854 seconds, with a top speed of over 156 mph. That's nothing compared to a Super Formula car’s potential at Yas Marina with a professional human racing driver behind the wheels, but it's not bad, either.
I don't want to gut the article too much.Finally, we got to the race between TUM, Unimore, Polimove, and Constructor. For reasons I can't fully explain, the opening few laps felt unbearably tense.