We expect the race will birth a fascinating new "television sport" with a fan-base of highly-educated technophiles drawn by the technological progress towards human capability in full view.

Eight teams will use identical Dallara Super Formula SF23 cars with the same autonomous technology stack, so like with any single marque race series, it's entirely down to the driver. This is a Grand Prix for software engineers. Each team can only utilize its coding skills, AI algorithms, and machine learning software expertise to teach the cars how to drive ... fast. The event will also see former Red Bull F1 driver Daniil Kvyat run against one of the autonomous cars in a non-autonomous Dallara SF23, and during testing Kvyat was much faster, but the gap was closing.

The eight teams will compete for a prize purse of US$ 2.25 million:

Code19 Racing (one of the first independent autonomous racing entities from the USA)

Constructor University (based in Germany and Switzerland)

Fly Eagle (representing Beijing Institute of Technology from China and Khalifa University from the UAE)

HUMDA Lab (a member of the Széchenyi István University Group from Hungary)

KINETIZ (a collaboration between Singapore Nanyang Technological University and Kintsugi based in the UAE)

PoliMOVE (representing Politecnico di Milano from Italy)

UNIMORE (also from Italy - University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)

Technical University of Munich - TUM (from Germany).

Why we think this is important

The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) is thinking big. In addition to the racing of autonomous cars, the intention is to establish a series of high-profile autonomous races for drones and dune buggies.