XBlades Racing clinches third straight Drone Champions League title

XBlades Racing turned Salina Turda’s underground mine into another checkpoint on its dynasty, winning the 2019 Drone Champions League finale 150 metres below the surface in Romania for a third straight title. The British squad’s hat-trick gave the field a clear benchmark, and it put Luke Bannister on four DCL championships after he had already won the inaugural 2016 season with XBlades.

The Salina Turda run was not a straight-line cruise. The final stop of the 2019 season used three laps, LED-lit drones and a course that asked pilots to wall-ride the vertical mine face, thread the legs of a Ferris wheel and drop to the mine floor at about 160 kph. XBlades handled the pressure with Bannister, Brett Collis, Gary Kent and Killian Rousseau in the lineup, a proper team rather than a one-off pairing of fast solo pilots.

That depth mattered because the title race was getting tighter, not easier. The Drone Champions League framed the 2019 battle as one that had intensified against APEX Racing and other teams, with APEX, Drone Sports and Veloce Racing all in the conversation as the season pushed toward the finale. XBlades did not just show up with raw speed; it arrived with a repeatable edge in setup, tuning and execution that kept it ahead when the course got chaotic.

The machine behind it mattered too. XBlades’ championship-winning quad had been helped along by Harry, who rose from assistant technician to team manager in 2020, a reminder that drone racing dynasties are built in the pits as much as in the air. The team’s 2019 title came with the kind of consistency that separates a hot streak from a genuine standard, and XBlades had spent the season racking up points while other teams chased the same narrow margins.

Salina Turda gave the win a setting worthy of the sport’s first real dynasty. The mine’s first explicit written record of salt exploitation dates to 1 May 1271, and the site’s history reaches back to salt deposited after an ancient sea evaporated. Its official history even says the reserve could theoretically cover the world’s salt needs for 60 years, a scale that fits the grandeur of a race held deep below ground.

The dynasty did not stop there. Red Bull’s 2020 finale report said XBlades sealed a fifth straight DCL title in the virtual season, with a 57-pilot field from 21 countries and a final standings gap that showed the championship tightening around them: XBlades finished on 940 points, while Quad Force One and APEX Racing tied on 870. The venue changed, the format changed, but the team at the front did not.