A Sub-250-Gram Drone Just Hit 500 km/h — Faster Than an F1 Car

October 20 — Guinness World Records announced today that the Chinese drone enthusiast Xu Yang has emphatically reclaimed the title for the fastest ground speed by a remote-controlled (RC) micro quadcopter with his new micro drone, the PROWESS-V3.

The craft, which weighs under 246 grams at take-off and is barely bigger than a palm, reached 500.01 km/h — fast enough to leave an F1 car far behind. It is the second time Xu has taken the world record for extreme drone speed.

Note: a micro quadcopter (microdrone) is a drone with a total weight of no more than 250 grams; the design challenge is achieving high power efficiency and flight stability in an extremely light airframe.

In May 2025, Xu Yang, an undergraduate in the 2021 cohort of the School of Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, broke the Guinness record with his self-designed micro quadcopter PROWESS, flying at 340.78 km/h to become the holder of the world's fastest RC micro quadcopter record.

Late in 2025, a young team of three 16-year-old school students, inspired by Xu's first record, optimised and developed PROWESS-V1.2 and pushed the record to 358.36 km/h.

Now Xu has broken the world record again with the PROWESS-V3. The drone's core structure uses carbon-fibre-reinforced nylon with a fibre content of 30%, while the body and tail use low-density ABS printed with an ultra-fine 0.25mm nozzle, pushing weight reduction to the limit.

Xu thought through every detail of the record attempt. He built a temperature-controlled box to heat the battery to precisely 50 degrees Celsius, ensuring it delivers maximum power, and made a drone base with a cooling fan to stop the equipment inside the shell from overheating on the ground.

Xu said: "For a while now I won't push the PROWESS any faster. I'll wait quietly for the next challenger, and I'm looking forward to seeing how far the limits of micro drones can be pushed — though I'm also quite confident that 500 km/h will be hard to beat in the short term."