Autonomous racing hits Italian circuit; UAE team claims debut victory at 250 kph

Many fans at Italy’s Imola circuit on Saturday got more than they bargained for. Arriving for a traditional motorsport weekend, they found themselves watching driverless cars thunder past at speeds exceeding 250 kilometers per hour, with no one at the wheel.

The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League made its international debut at the Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari, part of the broader ACI Racing Weekend. For many in the crowd, it was their first encounter with autonomous racing, a concept that Raffaele Giammaria, director of operations at ACI Sport, acknowledged is genuinely hard to absorb. “If you tell someone that there is no driver inside the car, I think it is difficult to realise,” he said.

The UAE’s Kinetiz won the 12-lap race with its Sparkz car, finishing nearly 11 seconds ahead of Germany’s Constructor Racing. Italy’s Unimore Racing placed third, while fellow Italian team PoliMOVE finished fourth after a collision between two of the competing vehicles. Germany’s TUM rounded out the five-team field. All teams raced in autonomous versions of the Dallara Super Formula SF23.

The collision between Unimore’s Gianna car and PoliMOVE’s Eva was a reminder of what still needs solving. At racing speeds, autonomous systems must process a torrent of inputs and translate them into physical actions in fractions of a second. Michael Sonderby, chief executive of Abu Dhabi autonomous mobility company SteerAI, which helped develop the original autonomy systems for A2RL, put it plainly: “There are still certain situations where an error can happen. It’s really the speed at which the decision-making needs to take all the inputs and process that into actions. That is truly the big challenge.”

Meanwhile, the pace of progress is striking observers. Giammaria pointed to the narrowing gap between autonomous lap times and those set by human drivers as concrete evidence. “Looking at the performance they are achieving, and in particular at the gap between their lap times and those achieved by a real driver, I think it is real proof of how big a step the technology is making,” he said.

What matters most to the public is where this technology goes next. Sonderby described ongoing discussions with large energy producers about deploying autonomous vehicles to move hazardous materials, explosives, and chemicals, tasks currently performed by people in dangerous conditions. “We’re having a lot of discussions with large energy producers who are saying, ‘Look, we are basically having to move explosives or we have to move chemicals, dangerous materials, and we have people doing that,’” he said. Removing workers from those situations is a direct safety benefit, and racing at high speed is how the underlying systems get stress-tested.

The Italian federation’s own racing school is now examining whether autonomous racing holds lessons for human driver training. Giammaria, who directs the Scuola Federale, sees genuine value in studying how computers handle corners and manage throttle and brakes. “If we are able to transmit to young drivers the way the computer approaches every single corner and every single use of the throttle and brakes, I think this is an added value for young drivers,” he said. The school’s training and research department is actively investigating what insights could transfer to human competitors.

This race marked A2RL’s first event outside Abu Dhabi, where the series had competed for two years at Yas Marina Circuit. The choice of Imola carries its own symbolism. The circuit sits at the heart of Emilia-Romagna’s Motor Valley, home to Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, and Pagani. Giammaria was direct about what it meant. “I think being able to have the first autonomous race outside Abu Dhabi in Italy, and in particular at Imola, is a big honour. We as the Italian federation are really proud to host this kind of race.”

SteerAI and A2RL have since developed along separate lines from their shared foundation. A2RL focuses on high-speed circuit racing; SteerAI builds autonomous systems for challenging off-road environments. Sonderby described the relationship with a tidy analogy: “You could say that we had the foundation, then they built one annexe and we’re now building another annexe.”

The broader question, left open by Saturday’s race, is how quickly capabilities proven on a closed circuit translate into systems that protect workers, improve safety, and handle complexity in the real world. Sonderby was direct about the ambition: “Doing it at speed means that, over time, we will be able to enable full autonomy and much broader use cases, higher speeds, more complexity in the environment.” Whether the timeline matches the promise is something future races, and future deployments, will have to answer.