Watch the World's Fastest Camera Drone Chase an F1 Car at 200 MPH

From package delivery to surveillance, drones have revolutionized how various industries perform—but perhaps none more than TV broadcasting. In many sports viewers are now treated to ridiculous camera angles thanks to zippy camera drones, but like most other equipment, they have their limitations. In Formula 1, those limitations are speed and stability. Until now.

Red Bull and the nutty folks of Dutch Drone Gods recently came together to create the world's fastest camera drone, one capable of keeping up with—if not beating—a modern-day F1 car. This challenge required developing a drone that's not just fast and agile, but also has enough battery capacity to allow high-speed flying for laps at a time. Oh, and it's also gotta record high-quality video, of course.

Drone pilot Ralph Hogenbirk and his crew first met up with the Red Bull squad at a drag strip, where their first drone prototype would race a decommissioned F1 car driven by David Coulthard. As it was to be expected, the drone beat the F1 car—not by much—but as Coulthard explained, straight-line speed isn't really what F1 cars are really good at. The real challenge was to build a drone that could follow an F1 car around a circuit.