DeLorean Motor Company will field the United States team in the Airspeeder International Series, an electric flying-car racing championship, when its 2026-27 season opens in November. The company announced the DeLorean Airspeeder Team on Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco and calls itself the first American constructor in flying-car racing.
In its first season the team races the Airspeeder Mk3C in DeLorean colors. A DeLorean aircraft for 2027-28 is to be designed with student engineering teams, including groups at UC Berkeley and Georgia Tech.
The pilot line-up will be named before the opener, the companies say. Airspeeder’s own homepage still describes its racing as “remote today, piloted tomorrow.”
DeLorean’s First Season Puts Its Name on Airspeeder’s Standard Racer
For 2026-27, DeLorean’s constructor role means “leading the design identity” of the Mk3C, the aircraft Airspeeder’s Adelaide-based sister company, Alauda Aeronautics, supplies to its teams. The announcement does not define the phrase or say who builds, owns or maintains the aircraft.
Autoweek describes the Mk3C as standardized and set apart by DeLorean-designed styling and branding. The launch photos show a silver body with the DeLorean and DMC logos, blue stripes and a USA flag behind the canopy. Airspeeder’s race series page says teams get their hardware from Alauda “as a turn-key solution” and are free to set strategy and draft pilots.
DeLorean chief brand officer Cameron Wynne pitched the deal as a long game. “People have pictured a DeLorean in the sky for forty years,” he said. In the full release he says DeLorean wants a hand in the regulatory, safety and compliance frameworks flying vehicles will need, and he says widespread use “remains over the horizon.” The release names no rival teams, no venue and no exact date. Airspeeder’s teams page lists Australia and Italia, a September release adds a New Zealand team, and Team Australia’s page says it races in South Australia in October 2026, a month before DeLorean’s November opener.
The Mk3C Comes From a Line Airspeeder Built to Fly With Nobody Aboard
Airspeeder unveiled the Mk3 in February 2021 as a remotely operated eVTOL. It is a 220-pound (100 kg) octocopter with a 96 kW powertrain, rated above 120 km/h (75 mph) and flown by a pilot on the ground. DeLorean’s release does not say whether anyone sits in the Mk3C.
In FAA terms, the 2021 Mk3 weighed four times the 55-pound ceiling of Part 107.
The same 2021 release promised “manned races scheduled in 2022,” and the race series page still promises 10 crewed teams by 2025. The crewed aircraft is the Mk4. Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority gave it an experimental flight certificate in September 2025, and Airspeeder showed it at The Bend Motorsport Park in South Australia in April 2026, where Team Australia and Team Italia flew Mk3C demonstrations, eVTOL Insights reported.
DroneXL first covered Airspeeder in February 2021, when the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch reported on the crash of its Mk II scale model in West Sussex, England, on July 4, 2019. The remote pilot lost control of the 210-pound (95 kg) aircraft, and the kill switch had no effect. It climbed to about 8,000 feet into controlled airspace used by Gatwick arrivals and came down in a field about 130 feet (40 meters) from homes when the battery ran out. The AAIB found it had not been designed, built or tested to recognized standards.
DroneXL’s Take
My read is that DeLorean has put its name on a large racing drone for its first season, and drone pilots should take that as a compliment. Flying a fast multirotor through a course from the ground is our skill set, and the collision avoidance and 55-second battery swaps Airspeeder races with are drone technology. If you want to see a person sitting in a single-seat eVTOL today, look at the Jetson ONE flight along the California coast we covered in March, or the Pivotal BlackFly, with more than 1,000 crewed flights under the FAA’s Part 103 ultralight rules. Airspeeder promised crewed racing for 2022, and four years later its homepage still says remote today. The pilot line-up due before the November opener will show whether DeLorean’s flying car has anyone inside it.
Sources: Airspeeder (DeLorean Airspeeder Team announcement, Mk3 announcement, CASA certificate announcement), Autoweek, eVTOL Insights.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
