Thunderstorms compress Collegiate Drone Racing Championship into one-day finale

Thunderstorms turned the Collegiate Drone Racing Championship into a one-day squeeze, but the title still got settled at SkyWay 36 Drone Port in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with Joshua “PrincessJ” Lizee taking the crown after MultiGP moved the finals off Sunday and packed qualifying, briefings and bracket racing into Saturday. The event page had listed a two-day window for April 11-12, 2026, but severe weather forced the entire championship run to compress before the skies closed in, and the venue’s 65 seats were all sold.

That pressure mattered because this was not a casual open bracket. MultiGP said the field was the largest Collegiate Drone Racing Championship yet, with 13 universities and more than 60 pilots, and the series is built around team scores, not just individual laps. Under CDRA rules, a chapter’s score comes from the top three pilot finishes, which means one crash or one clean pass can swing a school’s path through the bracket as much as it changes the leaderboard.

Qualifying set the tone for how tight the margins were going to be. UPTIMEFPV led the session in 48.098, KALLIFPV was next at 48.528 and WESLEYFPV followed at 49.241. Those times only separated the front of the field by tenths, and the same theme carried into the race results. Lizee finished first with 69 points, Wesley “wesleyfpv” Park was second with 68, Antoine “Baxony” Deschenes took third with 67, Kalli “kallifpv” Ames was fourth with 66 and Ari “uptimefpv” Stehney placed fifth with 65.

The title also landed inside a season-long collegiate scoreboard that still had Oregon State’s DAM Drones on top of the 2025-2026 CDRA standings. MultiGP lists the team format across approved school chapters, with chapters such as the University of Alabama Ripping Tide, RotorJackets and Multirotor Robotics Design Team among the group chasing the series lead. The venue itself helped make the championship possible: Skyway36 Droneport Technology Innovation Center offers four droneports, a 114-nautical-mile perimeter and 1,200 square miles of urban and rural testing space at 1211 West 36th St N.

MultiGP says the organization has more than 30,000 registered pilots and 500 active chapters worldwide, and the CDRA page already points to a return to Skyway36 in April 2027. For a championship that had to be compressed by weather, the weekend still delivered the one thing collegiate FPV is built to prove: the pilots who keep their nerve when the schedule breaks are the ones who leave with the trophy.