The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League will make its international debut at Imola on September 5, taking the UAE-born autonomous motorsport series to one of Europe’s most historic circuits.
The race will feature up to five fully autonomous cars based on the Dallara Super Formula SF23. Reigning champion Tum from Germany will be joined by Italy’s Unimore Racing and PoliMove, while the UAE’s Kinetiz and Germany’s Constructor Racing will compete in qualification events for the remaining grid places.
Organised by Aspire, the technology transition arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, A2RL has moved quickly from an experimental public test bed at Yas Marina Circuit into one of the UAE’s most visible technology platforms.
The Imola race marks a major step towards the series' ambition of becoming the world’s first international championship for fully autonomous race cars. It also gives the series a tougher test after two seasons in Abu Dhabi, where A2RL has progressed from a world-first four-car autonomous race to a six-car Grand Final featuring wheel-to-wheel racing at more than 250kph.
Alessandro Tucci, Executive Director of Aspire’s House of Grand Challenges, which co-ordinates major challenge-based technology programmes including A2RL, says the decision to leave Yas Marina was calculated.
“We do not want just to have another race,” he says. “Otherwise, we could have it here, and there would be a 99 per cent probability that there would be another success at Yas Marina. They know the circuit. They have raced here already.
“The underlying concept is that we need to develop autonomous technology. That is the objective.”
The 2026 season will still conclude at Yas Marina Circuit, bringing the series back to the city where it began. Before then, A2RL will have to prove that its technology can travel from a familiar home circuit to a track that has tested generations of human drivers.
Imola sits in Italy’s Motor Valley, the Emilia-Romagna region associated with some of the world’s best-known automotive and motorsport brands. The circuit is known for elevation changes, narrow racing lines, limited run-off areas and difficult overtaking zones.
Those qualities make the environment unforgiving for human drivers. Autonomous cars face a different kind of test there, one built around software, sensor integration, engineering strategy and real-time decision-making.
“Imola is the perfect testbed for the top A2RL teams to demonstrate their racing capabilities on an extremely challenging track,” Tucci says. “Imola does not allow for half-measures. It rewards precision, control and courage, which makes it the right circuit for autonomous racing to show what it can do under real pressure.”
“Every car on track carries the work of engineers and coders pushing AI from simulation into real competition.”
The challenge is not simply to make a car go quickly around an empty circuit. The harder problem is traffic and how one autonomous system reacts while several others are making their own decisions at racing speed.
“We say, ‘five or six cars on the track,’ and it is easy to say, but when you think about it, it is a big step,” Tucci says. “The computer needs to decide in milliseconds not only what to do, but what to do depending on the reaction and behaviour of one or two other cars.”
Much of the preparation will happen before the cars reach Imola. A2RL’s Sim Sprint series, running from May 19 to July 17, gives teams competitive mileage across high-fidelity digital twins of Yas Marina, the A2RL Autodrome, Suzuka and Imola. During the previous season, the platform delivered more than 5,000 hours of collective simulation testing and racing across 11 teams.
Tucci says the simulator is essential because teams will have only nine days of testing at Imola before the race.
“That helps the teams develop their algorithms,” he says. “It helps the teams do 70 to 80 per cent of the job before going to the track.”
Despite its focus on autonomy, A2RL is not yet a story of machines working alone.
“It is not yet capable of doing it alone,” Tucci says. “It still needs input from humans.”
Behind every autonomous car is a team of engineers, coders and researchers building the software agent that drives it. That exchange between people and machines has become one of A2RL’s defining themes, with the gap between human and AI performance narrowing from 10 seconds in 2024 to 1.58 seconds in 2025.
Tucci says the learning goes both ways. Drivers can help teams understand racing lines and strategy, while AI can reveal the value of consistency.
He says that in the Dallara Super Formula SF23 used by A2RL, a racing driver would normally run a set of tyres for about 150 kilometres. In 2025, some autonomous teams set their best laps on tyres that had covered 800 kilometres.
“The learning there is that AI is capable of a level of consistency compared with a human, who is much more subject to behaviour and internal inputs,” he says. “AI is much more constant.”
Still, he does not see autonomous racing as a replacement for traditional motorsport. Human drivers bring instinct, emotion and drama. A2RL’s role is different: it removes human risk and creates room for experimentation.
“From a motorsport point of view, that passion element will remain forever,” Tucci says.
Ahead of the race, A2RL has engaged Italy’s motorsport, engineering and academic sectors through Motor Valley Fest and university roadshows at the University of Bologna, the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and Politecnico di Milano.
Stephane Timpano, chief executive of Aspire, says taking A2RL to Imola is “a major milestone” in Aspire's ambition to build the world’s first international championship for fully autonomous race cars.
“Few circuits carry the heritage and global standing of Imola, making it a powerful stage for our first international race,” he says. “This is an important step for autonomous motorsport as both a technology platform and an emerging global sporting format.”
Tucci says Asia and the US could follow as A2RL looks towards its 2027 calendar, although no venues have been confirmed. Abu Dhabi, however, will remain central to the series.
“Abu Dhabi will always remain the grand finale because A2RL’s home is Abu Dhabi,” he says. “But we are planning at least another international race.”
At Imola, the race is only part of the test. The larger question is whether Abu Dhabi’s autonomous racing experiment can leave home, face one of motorsport’s most exacting circuits and show that its technology has the potential to travel.
