WRL Season 1: How GarudX Started Nepal's Most Accessible Drone Racing League
The Whoop Racing League Season 1, held at Global College and sponsored by Red Bull, Vianet, Orion Events, Yachu, Karv, and Yacu Hair Oil, proved that drone racing in Nepal doesn't have to cost a fortune — and the sport is better for it.
Nepal's drone racing scene has a problem. It's the same problem that every motorsport has when it starts growing: the people most excited about competing are often the people who can least afford to.
A competitive FPV racing drone costs anywhere from NPR 60,000 to NPR 150,000. Add goggles, a controller, and a few sets of replacement props, and you're looking at a six-figure investment before you've turned a single lap. For a college student in Kathmandu, that's not a barrier — it's a wall.
GarudX built the Whoop Racing League to knock that wall down.
The Idea Behind WRL
A "tiny whoop" is a class of micro FPV drone named, charmingly, after a sound someone made the first time they flew one. They measure roughly 65–75mm motor-to-motor. They weigh under 30 grams. They fly indoors. And a complete beginner setup — drone, controller, goggles — costs a fraction of a standard FPV racing rig.
The performance ceiling is lower than a full-size 5" racer. The entry ceiling is almost nothing.
That's the point. WRL was designed from the ground up to be a league where someone who bought their first drone a month ago can race against experienced pilots in a fair, structured, genuinely competitive format. Where the skill gap is real but the equipment gap is eliminated. Where the sport grows because the pathway into it is clear and affordable.
Season 1 — Global College, Kathmandu
The inaugural WRL Season 1 was held at Global College, Kathmandu — a venue chosen specifically because it could be used as an indoor racing arena, keeping the event weather-independent and making the racing tight, technical, and exciting for spectators packed around the course perimeter.
The course was designed with beginner-accessible lines but enough technical sections — tight corners, low gates, a chicane section — that experienced pilots had room to demonstrate their edge. Every gate was LED-lit. Lap timing was electronic, accurate to milliseconds. There was nothing provisional about this — it was a real race, run properly, from day one.
Sponsorship came from names that understood what we were trying to build. Red Bull — whose relationship with motorsport and emerging competitive scenes goes back decades — backed the event as a title sponsor. Vianet Communications, Nepal's leading internet provider and one of the most consistent supporters of the FPV community in Nepal, came on board. Orion Events handled production. Yachu, Karv, and Yacu Hair Oil completed a sponsorship lineup that meant we could run the event properly without charging pilots entry fees that would undermine the whole point.
What Happened on Race Day
If you've never watched tiny whoop racing before, the first thing that surprises you is the noise. These are small drones with small motors, but when fifteen of them are flying a tight indoor circuit at full throttle, the collective whine fills the venue in a way that's genuinely exciting — more aggressive-sounding than you'd expect from something you can hold in your palm.
The second thing that surprises you is how fast newcomers improve. We had pilots who had never raced before Season 1. By their third heat, some of them were cutting lines they couldn't have seen two hours earlier. That's the beauty of the format — the feedback loop is fast, the crashes are soft (tiny whoops are built to bounce), and you're back in the air within minutes.
Season 1 produced results, records, and — most importantly — a group of pilots who are now part of Nepal's growing competitive FPV community. Pilots who wouldn't have entered NDRL with a full-size 5" racer have now tasted competition. Some of them are already building their first larger quads.
That was always the plan.
Why This Matters for Nepal's Drone Ecosystem
Nepal has extraordinary drone talent. We've seen it at NDRL, we see it every time we run a workshop, and we see it in the pilots who reach out to us after watching videos online and teaching themselves to fly in their living rooms.
What Nepal has lacked is a structured, accessible entry point into competitive flying. WRL is that entry point. It's designed to create a pipeline: from WRL to NDRL, from hobbyist to professional, from spectator to pilot.
The drone industry in Nepal will only be as strong as the depth of talent feeding into it. WRL Season 1 proved there's an appetite for this — from pilots, from sponsors, from audiences. Season 2 is coming.
Watch the highlights from WRL Season 1 on YouTube.
