E-Paper
Sign In
Abu Dhabi takes driverless racing to Italy; official argues tech better than human
'Autonomous is not distracted by the phone. It is not distracted because you are tired. It is not distracted because you looked at something else,' a top official of the organising body said
- PUBLISHED: Mon 29 Jun 2026, 12:01 PM
When the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League lines up at Imola on 5 September, it will be racing in the region where European motorsport was born.
Within a short drive of the circuit sit Ferrari, Lamborghini, Ducati, Pagani, and Maserati, companies that became famous by proving themselves on racetracks. Into that landscape arrives a category none of them created, built instead in the UAE.
Recommended For You
Stay up to date with the latest news. Follow KT on WhatsApp channels.
"We want to show the world what is happening here in the UAE," Alessandro Tucci, Executive Director of the House of Grand Challenges at Aspire, the body that organises A2RL, told Khaleej Times. "Imola is at the centre of the Italian Motor Valley, the region where Italian and European motorsport was born. Putting the autonomous cars into Imola represents a next step for the technology and for the teams."
A2RL was created in 2024 as a testbed for autonomous driving under extreme conditions, racecars with no driver pushing past 250 kilometres per hour. After two seasons at Yas Marina Circuit, including the first wheel-to-wheel race of six driverless cars last November, taking the series abroad was always the plan. Imola was a deliberate choice, and not only for its heritage. It is one of the most technically demanding circuits in motorsport, with elevation changes, narrow racing lines, and little room for error.
The teams will get only nine days of track testing, split between July and August, before they race. The constraint is intentional. "We want to push the boundaries of their software development," Tucci said. "Giving them less and less time to discover a new track, adapt the software, and race." He is candid that the result is not guaranteed. "It's a one-million-dollar question, because no one knows how they will perform. But the teams are confident the software today is developed enough to perform well at Imola."
How far that software has come was made vivid earlier this season, when former Formula 1 driver Daniil Kvyat raced one of the autonomous cars. Given a ten-second head start to chase down the AI over ten laps, Kvyat set his fastest lap at 57.57 seconds against the machine's 59.15, a gap of just 1.58 seconds. Eighteen months earlier, when he first faced an AI car, the gap had been around ten seconds.
"Looking back to when development first began, with perhaps minutes between a human driver and the AI car, down to 10 seconds last year, and now within fractions of a second, the technology progress is staggering," Kvyat said.
For Tucci, the speed gap is not even the point. A2RL's focus has shifted to multi-car racing, several driverless cars sharing a track at once, because that is what reflects real life. "We are not giving the car the objective to be faster than the driver," he said. "An autonomous car will be driving together with other cars, with bicycles, with scooters, with people crossing the roads. That is the reality of the city."
Where machines already beat humans, he said, is consistency, and his evidence is concrete. A human driver wears out a set of tyres in roughly 150 kilometres, after which performance falls away. At Yas Marina, two of the top teams were setting their fastest laps on tyres that had already run 800 kilometres. He offered a second example from a drone competition held earlier in the year. One autonomous drone flew two laps of a course in exactly the same time, down to the millisecond, while a world-champion human pilot could not match his own line twice. "The human will never be able to be as consistent as the machine," Tucci said.
That consistency is where he connects the racing to something far larger than sport. He pointed to the roughly 1.2 million road deaths worldwide each year, citing an industry projection, which he shares, that as many as 80 per cent could eventually be prevented by autonomous systems. "Autonomous is not distracted by the phone. It is not distracted because you are tired. It is not distracted because you looked at something else," he said. The claim is contested among safety researchers, but the direction of the argument, that removing human error removes most crashes, is widely held.
The Imola weekend is built to serve that ambition beyond the track. Alongside the race, Aspire is convening a private gathering that brings local authorities and agencies together with Italian and European automotive companies, with the aim of starting partnerships. It is a deliberate reframing of what the event is for.
"Abu Dhabi is doing a fantastic job around autonomy, but it also needs partnerships with foreign companies working in the sector," Tucci said. He sees the traditional automotive industry, squeezed as ownership gives way to shared and autonomous transport, as actively looking for new direction, and the UAE as well placed to offer one.
Two of the competing teams come from the UAE, and for them the race is a route to turn engineering research into commercial work. Tucci described the field as among the best autonomy laboratories and research centres in the world, and the Imola meeting as a chance to connect that talent with industry.
The deeper purpose, in Tucci's telling, is public trust. A person booking a robotaxi that arrives empty will hesitate, he said, asking whether the machine can safely carry them, or their child to school. A2RL is meant to answer that through spectacle, showing that driverless technology is not distant. "Autonomous technology is not something futuristic," he said. "It is for tomorrow morning." Driverless taxis already operate in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere, and the startups building them, he argues, draw on the same technology the teams refine under racing's extreme conditions.
After Imola, A2RL returns to Yas Marina for the 2026 season finale, bringing the championship back to where it started. Tucci wants it to keep moving in the years ahead, to Asia, the United States, and back to Europe.
Ahmed Waqqas Alawlaqi is the youngest Special Correspondent, reporting from Abu Dhabi on youth, AI and innovation, and human-interest stories. His work brings exclusive perspectives from the Capital, highlighting voices that shape the UAE's future.