Formula 1 Puts FPV Drone Footage At The Center Of Austrian GP Coverage, And Fans Want The Pilot’s Name

Formula 1 ran FPV drone footage as a headline feature of its Austrian Grand Prix broadcast on Sunday, June 28, 2026, and the standout sequence put viewers directly above the early on-track fight between Lewis Hamilton in the Ferrari and Max Verstappen in the Red Bull at the Red Bull Ring. The shots aired live during the race and again on replay, dropping the camera low over the cars as they crested and dove through the Spielberg hills at racing speed. I was watching the race on Apple TV, F1’s new exclusive US broadcaster for 2026, when the drone angle cut in on lap 11. It reframed the whole battle.

This is the viewpoint F1 has been circling for years, and on Sunday it finally treated the drone not as a novelty cutaway but as a primary camera. The reaction online was immediate. Within minutes of the footage airing, fans were asking the only question that matters once you have seen it: who was flying that thing?

F1 promoted the drone footage as a main attraction, not a gimmick

Formula 1’s own channels leaned all the way into the footage rather than burying it. The official F1 account posted a low, fast pass over the circuit captioned “Flying fast over the Red Bull Ring, as seen from the drone-eye view,” and Oracle Red Bull Racing followed with a clip of the Hamilton-Verstappen scrap captioned “Come for the battle, stay for the drone footage.” When the team whose driver is being chased is the one promoting the chase camera, the broadcast has decided this angle sells.

Fan accounts piled on through the afternoon. One widely shared post simply read “Take a bow, F1. This drone footage. Somebody get me the pilot’s name.” Another, translated from Turkish, joked that “at this rate, no one will watch the race on the track.” The footage carried an on-screen timing tower showing lap 11 of 71, with Hamilton and Verstappen running nose to tail in second and third, which lines up with the battle as it played out on track.

FPV drones in F1 go back to the 2022 Spanish Grand Prix

Formula 1 first put an FPV drone into a live race broadcast at the 2022 Spanish Grand Prix, capturing a Verstappen win. That debut was rough. The drone appeared to be running a basic GoPro, the footage looked soft next to F1’s other cameras, and DroneXL said at the time the shots did not yet match the quality of the rest of the coverage. The idea was right even when the execution was not, as DroneXL reported in 2022.

The technology kept moving. In 2023, Johnny FPV chased a Red Bull car through the Las Vegas desert and onto the Strip in a piece of pure cinema, which DroneXL covered here. Then came the project that changed expectations: the Dutch Drone Gods, working with Red Bull Advanced Technologies, built a purpose-made chase drone and flew a full lap behind Verstappen’s RB20 at Silverstone, hitting 310 km/h (193 mph) in a straight line. We documented that build in our drone versus F1 car story.

By the 2024 Hungarian Grand Prix, FPV drone shots were appearing during the live race itself, woven into multiple laps of broadcast coverage. That progression, from a soft GoPro cutaway in Spain to a featured camera in Austria, is the story of a tool earning its place, as our Hungarian GP coverage laid out.

The hard part is keeping a drone with an F1 car and away from the crowd

Flying FPV at a Grand Prix is a different problem from flying it down a rally stage. An F1 car corners and brakes in ways no drone can casually mirror, and a circuit packs enormous crowds tight against the action. Safety rules keep drones from flying over spectators or crossing the live track, which limits where a pilot can place the aircraft and forces the drone to work the car from the side and from above rather than chasing directly through every corner.

F1 has been building toward this carefully. The sport now runs its own internal drone systems, flown at roughly ten races a season at tracks like Bahrain, Miami and Budapest, with the in-house hardware chosen specifically because it is pre-approved and easier to clear past the licensing, insurance and safety rules that change from country to country, as F1 TV production chief Dean Locke told SVG Europe. Locke has also said the Red Bull chase drone remains a private project F1 is still only in talks about using, since it cannot fly over a crowd or cross the track. Whatever flew at the Red Bull Ring on Sunday, the most likely answer is F1’s own drone operation, and that does not make the footage any less worth watching.

That constraint is exactly why a skilled human pilot matters. The Dutch Drone Gods flew their Silverstone laps manually, on sticks, without GPS or automated tracking, reading the car and the circuit in real time. Compare that with the autonomous subject-tracking that consumer drones advertise, and the gap is obvious. A trained FPV pilot holding a clean frame on a Formula 1 car through a fast, blind crest is doing something the marketing demos do not come close to, a point we made watching an FPV drone chase a WRC rally car earlier this year. The Austrian footage was not perfect. It did not need to be. It needed to feel fast, and it did.

DroneXL’s Take

There is no better way to bring the action to TV viewers than FPV drone shots. You are watching a dynamic race from a dynamic point of view, and it does not get any better than this. A trackside camera shows you the car going past. A helicopter shows you the circuit from a polite distance. An onboard camera bolts you to one machine. The FPV drone puts you in the race, moving with the cars, dropping through the same hills they do, carrying the same sense of speed the drivers feel. That is the whole point, and on Sunday F1 finally let it carry a marquee moment instead of a filler replay.

We have seen this work before outside motorsport. FPV drones brought that same in-the-action immediacy to the 2026 Winter Olympics, flying the courses with the athletes instead of watching from the bottom of the hill, as DroneXL covered earlier this year. Same principle, same payoff. When the camera moves the way the sport moves, the viewer feels it in a way a fixed lens can never deliver.

I have been making this argument for years, including in February when I wrote that every major motorsport series would have dedicated FPV drone coverage. Formula 1 putting this footage front and center, with the teams themselves amplifying it, is that prediction landing in real time. The holdouts are running out of excuses. Now F1 owes the fans one more thing: tell us who was flying. The pilot pulling clean frames on Hamilton and Verstappen at the Red Bull Ring earned a credit, and the sport that just used their work to sell its broadcast should put their name on screen. If we track down who flew it, we will update this article.

Source: Formula 1 and Oracle Red Bull Racing via X. Photo credit: Formula 1, Apple TV.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.