Formula 1 used drone footage more aggressively, and more creatively, in today’s Hungarian Grand Prix broadcast than in any race I have watched this season. Following the Apple TV feed on Sunday, July 26, I counted drone angles woven into the live coverage from lap 3 onward, and two of them stopped me cold. The first was a top-down shot of a corner in which the drone rotated in place as the cars swept through, holding the pack centered in frame like a turntable. The second came on lap 7 near Turn 4: an FPV drone running flat out alongside the field, then passing underneath the Standard Chartered sponsor bridge with the cars.
Lando Norris won the race after teammate Oscar Piastri, who led the opening stint, retired with a gearbox failure on lap 56. But for drone pilots, the story was in the camerawork.
The Rotating Top-Down Shot Did What A Helicopter Cannot
A helicopter was still working the race, and its wide establishing shots remain part of F1’s coverage. What the helicopter cannot do is hover a stabilized camera directly over a corner apex and spin with the traffic. That rotating overhead view compressed an entire multi-car scrap into one frame with no cuts. It is the kind of shot that used to require a cable cam rig strung across the circuit. Here it came from an aircraft that can reposition to any corner between laps.
The fly-under was the bolder call. Threading a drone beneath a bridge structure while pacing cars at racing speed leaves very little margin, and I would call it risky if amateurs were attempting it. They were not. That distinction is the entire point.
The FPV drone runs alongside the field toward the Standard Chartered bridge at Turn 4 on lap 7. Photo credit: Apple TV and Formula 1.
Dutch Drone Gods Are Formula 1’s Drone Partner
F1’s drone partner is the Dutch Drone Gods, the Utrecht-based outfit founded by Vince Tonk and Ralph “Shaggy FPV” Hogenbirk. They built the rocket-shaped chase drone that followed Max Verstappen’s RB20 for a full lap of Silverstone in 2024 at 310 km/h (193 mph), a project with Red Bull Advanced Technologies that DroneXL covered when the drone out-dragged a Tesla Model S Plaid and that has since inspired hobbyist builds. The team is EASA-certified and was the first Dutch company to comply with Europe’s enhanced containment rules for custom FPV drones, according to the company.
Their hardware entered live race coverage this summer. F1 made FPV footage a centerpiece of the Austrian Grand Prix broadcast on June 28, and a new version of the rocket drone with a movable camera debuted at Spa-Francorchamps on July 19. Ahead of that race, project advisor Taco Ketelaar told Dutch public broadcaster NOS that the drone is flown by one operator while a second controls the camera, with radio coverage and safety permits determining which sections of track it may fly. Hungary, one week later, showed that operating envelope widening again.
DroneXL’s Take
Compare today to the 2024 Hungarian Grand Prix, which I covered on this same circuit two years ago. Back then the FPV drone was penned into Turn 13, appeared on five laps, and produced footage I described at the time as less spectacular than the rest of the coverage. Today the drone flew alongside the cars, under a bridge, on the world feed of a race Norris won, and it felt routine. That is what two years of certified crews and purpose-built hardware buy you.
The fly-under is worth dwelling on. From my couch it read as a high-wire act. In reality it was a permitted operation by a two-person certified crew flying containment-compliant hardware at a circuit where drones are strictly prohibited for everyone else, a pattern we first reported from Zandvoort. That gap between perceived risk and managed risk is the argument drone professionals should be making everywhere: spectacular does not have to mean reckless. The reckless version is the hobbyist who launches over a packed grandstand for the same shot. Don’t be that guy. He is the reason the permits exist.
F1 now heads into its four-week summer break. When the season resumes at the end of August, watch how much more of each circuit the movable-camera drone is cleared to cover. The direction of travel is one drone doing work that once took a helicopter, a cable cam, and a crane.
Sources: Formula 1, NOS, Dutch Drone Gods. Photo credit: Apple TV and Formula 1.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
