DeLorean Airspeeder Team: What Its Flying-Car Constructor Role Means

For forty years, the DeLorean has been the car people imagine leaving the ground. On October 13, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, DeLorean Motor Company signed up to make that literal. It will be the constructor behind the United States entry in the Airspeeder International Series, racing as the DeLorean Airspeeder Team when the electric flying-car championship opens its first international season in November.

The word carrying most of the weight in that announcement is “constructor.” In year one, DeLorean races the Airspeeder Mk3C, the aircraft the series supplies, with the company leading its design identity. Read that as styling and livery, not airframe engineering. The engineering ambition arrives a season later: the 2027–28 DeLorean Airspeeder is to be designed with student engineering teams at U.S. universities, UC Berkeley and Georgia Tech among them. That second aircraft is where we find out whether DeLorean is a constructor or a very famous sponsor.

What “constructor” means when everyone flies the same machine

In Formula 1, a constructor designs its own chassis. Airspeeder works differently. The series says its hardware comes from Alauda Aeronautics as a turnkey package: a carbon-fibre monocoque, redundant motors, extra batteries and a safety parachute. Every team starts from the same aircraft.

That isn’t a knock. A spec aircraft is the sensible way to run a young series. It keeps costs predictable, keeps the field close and stops a well-funded newcomer from turning the championship into a procession in its first season. But it does mean DeLorean’s 2026–27 role sits closer to a Formula E customer team than a works operation. Compare it with a carmaker like Opel, which is running its own Formula E works team and developing powertrain hardware. DeLorean’s first-season contribution is the look of the thing, plus whatever it brings to team operations.

Remote today, and the series says so itself

The detail fans will care about most: who’s actually inside? Airspeeder’s own homepage answers it with a slogan: “Remote today. Piloted tomorrow.” The series’ first competition, the EXA series launched in 2021, used teams of two remote pilots.

A crewed aircraft does exist. Airspeeder says Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority granted its Mk4 an experimental flight certificate, which the company announced in September 2025 and called a first for a racing eVTOL. Experimental certification lets you fly and test. It doesn’t put a crewed grid on a start line, and the series hasn’t published a date for crewed racing. Its race-series page still projects “10 crewed teams by 2025,” a target the calendar has already passed.

Neither DeLorean nor Airspeeder has named the team’s pilots yet. The pilot line-up, aircraft design and sporting program are all due before the season opener. Until the series says otherwise, assume the DeLorean in November is flown from the ground.

Five crew members in navy team shirts work around a DeLorean-branded Airspeeder Mk3C racing eVTOL parked on a salt flat during a pit stop drill. — DeLorean Airspeeder Team crew drill a pit stop on the Mk3C. Airspeeder lists its current battery-swap stop at 55 seconds. (Image: Airspeeder)

Racing inside walls you can’t see

There’s no tarmac, so there are no kerbs, no gravel and no white lines. Airspeeder courses are electronically defined in three dimensions. The series lists the safety layer underneath: collision-avoidance software, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, LiDAR and machine vision, and digitally enforced no-fly zones around spectators and officials.

That changes what “track limits” means. On a circuit, a steward reviews footage of a wheel over a line. Here, the boundary is a geofence, and the aircraft’s own sensors know where it is. Officiating becomes partly a software problem. How the series handles a pilot who clips a virtual boundary while defending a position is the kind of sporting-regulations detail worth watching for once the rules for the international season are published.

Strategy runs through the batteries. Airspeeder’s pit stop swaps two battery packs and currently takes 55 seconds, which makes energy use and stop timing the central race-craft variable, much as it is in Formula E’s electric racing strategy. That also makes the pit crew, the one area where a new team can out-work an established one on day one, a real performance lever for DeLorean.

There’s a viewing problem too. A race track no one can physically see only works on screen if the graphics package draws it convincingly. Formula E has spent a lot of effort making its invisible energy game visible to viewers; Airspeeder has to do that for the whole circuit.

Why a car brand wants a seat at this table

Airspeeder founder and CEO Matt Pearson put the brand case bluntly: “DeLorean is the original flying car brand.” DeLorean Chief Brand Officer Cameron Wynne said, “DeLorean has always stood for the courage to imagine transportation differently.” He also framed motorsport as the place mobility brands prove themselves, and said DeLorean wants a hand in shaping the regulatory, safety and compliance frameworks for flying vehicles.

That last point is the smart part of the deal. DeLorean doesn’t have an eVTOL program. A race team gets it in the room where operational norms for small electric aircraft get tested in public, for the price of a team entry rather than an aircraft-development budget. The university partnership fits the same logic: engineering capacity and a recruiting pipeline without building a full aerospace department.

The series needs DeLorean as much as the reverse. Pearson said, “Every great racing series is defined by the constructors who choose to compete in it.” By that measure Airspeeder is still being defined. Its teams page lists Team Australia and Forza Team Italia, and its recent news covers sponsor signings for Team Australia and Airspeeder New Zealand. A recognizable American name gives the international season something it plainly lacked: a team casual U.S. viewers already know.

What to watch before November

The pilot line-up. Names, backgrounds and whether they fly remotely. That tells you more about the team’s seriousness than any livery.
A venue and calendar. As of this writing, Airspeeder’s site doesn’t list a location or schedule for the November opener.
The sporting regulations. Especially how penalties for boundary infringements and pit-stop errors are applied.
The 2027–28 technical freedom. The key question for the student-designed aircraft is how much a constructor is actually allowed to change. If it’s bodywork, the “constructor” label stays mostly marketing. If it reaches propulsion, battery packaging or aerodynamics, DeLorean becomes a real engineering entrant.

For now, the flying DeLorean is mostly what fans have always pictured: the badge in the sky, with someone else’s engineering underneath. The interesting version shows up in 2027–28.