DJI at the WRC: some truly astonishing drone flying

As above, so below: a DJI Inspire 1 tracking a very fast car...

Forgive us if you’ve already seen this, particularly any motorsports enthusiasts among you, but we’ve only just stumbled across the drone footage being captured from the World Rally Championships this year and we are astonished.

We’re not sure that the picture above does this justice — it doesn’t capture the sheer speed as that DJI Inspire 1 drone tracks £500,000’s worth of state-of-the-art World Rally Car round a hairpin bend in the snows of a Swedish winter — but hopefully it will entice you to at least run the video below.

If not, here’s another one from the sandy roads of Portugal.

Frankly, this is astonishing stuff. We’ve become used to seeing all manner of drone beauty shots over recent years, but using them to convey the sheer speed and Götterdämmerung fury of rally cars close-up is something else. And again, we’ve seen plenty of aerial shots of WRC cars too — helicopters are one of the only ways of ensuring coverage of the sports long, twisty stages — but never this close. You want astonishing jib shots in the middle of a Finnish Forest as the cars perform insane jumps over the crests of dirt tracks at 100mph plus and pass underneath the camera? You’ve got them.

We’re not normally ones to link to company blogs, but DJI’s one about covering the WRC is fascinating and happily festooned with footage and some interesting detail of the technical and non-technical variety (sometimes, as the cars come by, the drone team have to have other people on stand-by to yank them out of the way suddenly if things go wrong). You can have a look at it here. http://events.dji.com/home/wrc/index?l=en&id=7

The WRC also serves as a test bed for new tech too, DJI promising that it will be showing an innovative approach to aerial analysis and live streaming at the next event in Germany in mid-August. In the meantime, if you’ve ever wanted to watch a car fly…