The corkscrew turn at Laguna Seca Raceway was the site of multiple overtakes at this year’s autonomous race. | Credit: IAC
The latest Indy Autonomous Challenge, or IAC, university race took place on Sept. 3, prior to the annual Grand Prix of Monterey weekend. This year’s event featured the first time in IAC history that the autonomous racecars overtook one another on a road course.
The winning team was Unimore Racing from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. The final heat featured a race between Unimore and Purdue AI Racing.
Nine university teams from North America, Europe, and Asia competed in this event, with their AI driver software piloting AV-24s provided by IAC. The organization has held six passing competitions since 2022, all on oval tracks, including the historic Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Texas Motor Speedway, and Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
I attended the 2025 IAC event at Monterey, where the IAC demonstrated autonomous vehicle racing on a road track for the first time in North America. At that event, the teams competed for the fastest lap times, with only one vehicle on the course at a time.
One-on-one heats feature overtaking
This year’s competition consisted of one-on-one heats in which the overtaking car had two laps to overtake the lead vehicle. The teams then swapped positions and increased the power limits for the engines.
While on course, the AI drivers made all of the decisions about when and where to pass on the race course, once the heat started. The human crews monitored vehicle data and could tweak the parameters before the start of the next overtake lap. They also kept their hands on the e-stop button in case of a malfunction or collision.
Most of the work for each team happens away from the track, where the teams modify and test the AI driving algorithms in simulation throughout the rest of the year.
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The teams qualified for the event a few months earlier, in a simulation race event hosted by D-Space. This is the first time that participating teams have been required to qualify for an autonomous race within a virtual testing environment before being allowed to compete on a physical track.
The IAC event is primarily an AI driver software event, as the vehicles all have the same Dallara base design, Honda engine, Luminar sensors, and NVIDIA GPU.
Within the D-Space software-in-the-loop environment, the teams validated vehicle behavior, race strategy, and overtaking performance in a realistic digital twin of Laguna Seca raceway. This ensured that any algorithm anomalies wouldn’t lead to an on-track collision resulting in damage to a race car.
The teams typically consist of Ph.D. and master’s students, all of whom are working on autonomous driving or vehicle-related research. The IAC event started in 2021 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, with an international lineup of university teams.
Each team is supported by sponsors and donors in the automotive and physical AI market, as the research and event directly influence the pace of innovation for autonomous driving, according to the IAC.
Several team members have started new companies in the automotive space after completing their research programs and working with the IAC race program. Examples include Aidoptation, driveblocks, and Autonoma AI.
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