Racing Drone Buyers Guide

What’s In This Guide

This buyer's guide is for first-time drone racers who want to educate themselves on:

what FPV/drone racing is all about

the most important factors & features to consider when buying a racing rc drone; and,

the best racing drones to buy.

What Is A Racing Drone?

Drone Racing League - Gates of Hell

A racing drone is a small quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is purpose-built to compete in FPV (first person view) racing events held in most major cities around the world. See the list of drone events below, for more details on these.

NOTE: Racing drones are not the same as camera drones like the Phantom 4 Pro. Camera drones like the Phantom fly “slow and low” and are designed to capture high-quality video of surfing contests, real estate and landscapes. A racing quadcopter's camera can't do that.

To learn more about camera drones check out our camera drone buyer's guide.

What's Not Covered Here

This racing drone guide does not cover advanced modding; the intricacies of optimizing components; nor, detailed DIY assembly instructions.

We also don't discuss technical performance parameters, like the correct prop blade angle of attack.

For technical and DIY deep-dives, check out the following excellent websites and blogs:

RCGroups MultiRotors Forum

Reddit/r/Multicopter

Down-And-Dirty-Drones’ Drone Physics Guide

TauLabs Flight Software Forum

MiniQuad Test Bench – motors and ESC performance testing

DroneTrest – detailed component buying guides

RotorBuilds.com – dozens of custom builds, crowd-ranked and tested. I love the Purple Haze.

UAVFutures video reviews – entertaining video DIY guides and reviews of the latest FPV / racing drones

Read Our Reviews

After reading this guide, you can learn more about some of the leading racing drones for sale today by reading our reviews.