Miron Cheremnykh tops 15-pilot Mirror e-Drone World Cup opener

Miron Cheremnykh gave the 2026 FAI Mirror e-Drone Racing World Cup its first clear leaderboard, steering RedSheep to the top of a 15-pilot field and beating Yiran Sheng’s DuoNaFPV entry from China and Elisey Timofeev’s LuckyNemo from Australia. The opener, run on Saturday, May 23, was the season’s first meaningful scoreboard and immediately separated the early title contenders from the rest of the pack.

The Mirror Cup format made that pecking order more revealing than a standard simulator race. Pilots had to attack two identical sections of the track, then repeat the run through a mirrored layout on the opposite side, a setup designed to test spatial control and consistency rather than raw setup ingenuity. FAI kept the event on the Standard drone model with default settings, which stripped away hardware advantages and turned the race into a direct comparison of pilot precision. Behind the podium, Aoi Saito finished fourth, Morten Siimar fifth, Peteris Ozolins sixth, Kenta Imamura seventh and Ainol Aizizie eighth, with the rest of the 15-pilot ranking filling out an unusually international first-round field.

That matters because the 2026 e-Drone series is built as a seven-event simulator championship, and Cheremnykh’s win came in the third season of an annual competition that FAI launched in 2024. The overall World Cup champion will be the best-placed pilot in the final ranking, while the top three at season’s end receive CIAM medals and diplomas. In that context, the Mirror Cup was more than an online opener. It was a stress test for who can carry speed across repeated, identical obstacles, the kind of skill that tends to translate when real-world racing demands split-second line choice under pressure.

The event also sat inside a much larger 2026 World Cup calendar, with 15 drone-racing World Cup competitions from 13 countries on the schedule. Remote pilots flew from home using a Windows computer, a game controller and stable internet connection, and the official livestream ran across YouTube, Twitch and Facebook through FAI and EreaDrone channels. The season’s first verdict was already familiar at the sharp end: Sheng was back in the hunt after finishing second in the inaugural 2024 e-Drone title race behind Swan Versmissen of France, while Cheremnykh’s opening win gave Spain the early bragging rights in a championship where the margin for error is as narrow as the mirrored track itself.