FAI Drone Sports

Fourteen-year-old pilot MinJae Kim of Korea is the winner of the 2022 FAI Drone Racing World Cup. Congratulations!

• Read news: Hard work pays off for 2023 FAI Drone Racing World Cup Champion MinJae Kim
• Download the 2022 Drone Racing World Cup Rules (Effective 1st March 2022)
• Download the final results and ranking 2022 Drone Racing World Cup - Results & Ranking V1   (Dated November 10, 2022)
• Download the World Cup coordinator's report 2022 Drone Racing World Cup - Report V1-1    (Updated January13, 2023)

World Cup contests are FAI second category events based on individual participation (no national team representing a NAC). Any person holding a valid FAI Sporting Licence or FAI Drone Permission can be eligible for the World Cup ranking.

Two Drone Racing World Cup events may be organized every year for any country. For a country which extends over more than three time zones, one World Cup contest may be organized within each time zone of the country with a maximum of four events for the country.

There were initiallly 14 Drone Racing World Cup events (Challenger Series) from 11 different countries published on the FAI Calendar for the year 2022. This is far from the number of events hold in 2019 (24 events from 19 countries) or in 2018 (22 events from 17 countries).

In that situation and in order to improve the interest of the Drone Racing World Cup, it has been decided for the 2022 World Cup ranking to consider for each competitor 3 events of different countries (instead 4 up to now). The Drone Racing World Cup rules have been modified consequently.

Five events initially registered had been removed from the 2022 World Cup calendar :

- European Drone Festival May 18 and 19 in Nördlingen (Germany) due to organisation issues.

- Drone Racing Grand Prix de France July 22 to 24 in Le Castellet (France) due to a low number of participants registered and organisation issues.

- FAI Drone Racing World Cup Moscow July 29 to 31 in Moscow (Russia) due to the February 28 FAI decision to ban Russian Federation.

- UK Drone Racing World Cup Open International 27 to 29 August in RAF Barkston Heath (United Kingdom) due to the fact that the airport must be kept 'available' given the actual heightened state of alert.

- Daegu Drone Race World Cup October 9 and 10 in Daegu due to organisation issues. So, 9 World Cup events had been effectively organised.

Note: World Cup Masters Series had been introduced in 2019. No Masters event had been considered in 2022.

Click on the link in the 'Event' column to access FAI database information for a specific event

EVENT

LOCATION

DATES

The Drone World Cup El Yelmo event (ESP-1) had not been retained for the World Cup ranking because all competitors were only from Spain. So, there had been finally only 8 events, all from different countries, considered for the 2022 World Cup ranking.

171 competitors from 22 countries  (BEL, BUL, CZE, CRO, ESP, FRA, GER, HUN, ITA, JPN, KOR, MAS, MKD, POL, ROU, SIN, SRB, SUI, SVK, THA, TPE, USA) including 52 juniors and 5 women have been placed in at least one World Cup event. This is an important decrease from 2019 (566 from 46 countries) after the two years break due to COVID.

The total World Cup score for each participant is the sum of their best three event results (numbers of points). For each participant, one event result per organising country can count towards his or her World Cup placing (with higher points awarded if he or her scores in two contests in any one organising country).

2 juniors are on the podium of the overall ranking and 6 juniors are in the 10 top places.