Gemfan support shapes close collegiate drone racing title fight in Tulsa

Gemfan’s propeller support did not win the 2026 Collegiate Drone Racing Championship for anyone in Tulsa, but it helped sharpen the margins enough to make the title fight look like a true pipeline test. At SkyWay 36 Drone Port, the championship came down to precision, consistency and tiny setup differences, with Joshua ‘PrincessJ’ Lizee finishing first on 69 points and Wesley ‘wesleyfpv’ Park right behind on 68.

That was the point of Gemfan’s backing. The company said it provided racing-prop application support across multiple teams to help standardize conditions across different flying styles and reduce the equipment noise that can blur a championship. In a field this compressed, that matters. When the difference between first and second is a single point, and third is only one more back at 67 for Antoine ‘Baxony’ Deschenes, hardware consistency stops being a footnote and starts acting like a separator.

Tulsa was the official culmination of the 2025-2026 collegiate season, and the format made it feel more like a development ladder than a one-off event. MultiGP describes CDRA as a team competition with university scores built from the top three pilots at each school, which means every clean lap counts twice: once for the pilot, and again for the program trying to build a roster that can travel, qualify and survive elimination pressure. MultiGP’s event listing showed 12 schools and more than 50 pilots, while its race report said 13 universities and more than 60 pilots answered the call, framing it as the most attended CDRC yet.

The speed at the front told the same story. Ari ‘uptimefpv’ Stehney led qualifying at 48.098, Kalli ‘kallifpv’ Ames was next at 48.528, Wesley Park posted 49.241 and Lizee came in at 49.830. Those gaps are small enough to vanish with one bad corner or one prop that does not behave the same way from battery to battery. Gemfan said its support was aimed at standardizing those conditions, and the bracket showed why that kind of help matters when a title is decided by tenths in qualifying and a single point in the final standings.

SkyWay 36 also gave the championship the kind of backdrop this sport is chasing. Partner Tulsa describes the site, about three miles north of downtown Tulsa and four miles west of Tulsa International Airport, as a budding autonomous flight technology center with a 3,000-foot runway, renovated hangar and office space, and a 40-acre industrial park. For collegiate FPV racing, that is bigger than a venue. It is a signal that the next elite pilots are being sorted on campuses, but shaped by the brands, schools and formats that can turn a fast flyer into a repeatable winner.