RotorLab
Iowa’s only MultiGP chapter — and an open one: fly what you race. Standardized gates, a stopwatch that does not care who you are, and a ladder that runs from a field outside Dubuque to a world final.
Hundreds of chapters run MultiGP racing across the world. Illinois has them. Minnesota has them. Missouri, Wisconsin, Nebraska — all of them have somewhere to go on a Saturday. For a long time an Iowa pilot who wanted to race a sanctioned round drove out of state to do it.
That dot is in Dubuque, and it is us. RotorLab Racing is a chartered MultiGP chapter, which means the rounds we fly here count the same as the rounds anyone flies anywhere: same rulebook, same track standards, same national rankings, same road to the International Open.
We did not start a chapter to be the only one. We started it because there wasn’t one, and a sport with no local gate is a sport that never gets a next generation.
Chartered chapter · Dubuque, Iowa
The league we fly under
Drone racing spent its first years as a thousand local clubs each with its own gates, its own timing and its own idea of a fair heat. MultiGP is what fixed that: a published rulebook, standardized track elements, sanctioned events, and a ranking that means something because everyone flew the same thing.
More than thirty thousand registered pilots fly under it. Every one of them can fly the same time-trial track in their own field and see exactly where that time sits against the rest of the world. There is no other sport where the barrier between a beginner’s first lap and a nationally ranked one is this thin.
We are not a MultiGP alternative and we are not trying to become one. We are a chapter. Everything on this page defers to multigp.com — their rules, their calendar, their rankings.
MultiGP title sequence. Used with permission.
Classes, frame and battery limits, gate dimensions, heat structure, safety and frequency management. Written down, versioned, and the same in Dubuque as it is in Dallas.
Gate and flag layouts published as designs anybody can build. It is what makes a time flown in one field comparable to a time flown in another, which is the whole basis of the ranking.
Chapter rounds feed regional standing, regional standing feeds the Global Qualifier, and the Global Qualifier feeds the International Open. The bottom rung is a Saturday afternoon.
MultiGP® and the MultiGP marks are the property of MultiGP, Inc. and are used here with permission as one of its chapters. For current rules, classes, event dates and rankings, go to multigp.com — if anything here disagrees with them, they are right.
Nobody is scouted into this. You show up with a quad, you fly a standardized track, and the clock puts you where you belong.
MultiGP’s solo format: one standardized track, one pilot, one clock. Fly it at our field, submit the time, and it is ranked against every other pilot in the league who flew the same layout. It is the cheapest, fastest, least intimidating way into competitive racing that exists — no heats, no head-to-head, nothing to be nervous about except your own lap.
Our own season. Heats, brackets, a start tone and three other quads in the air with you, which is a completely different sport from flying alone against a clock. This is where you learn to hold a line with somebody on your inside.
One weekend, hundreds of chapters, the same qualifying track everywhere. Every chapter runs it locally and the results roll up into one worldwide standing. You do not travel to qualify — you qualify at home, and then you travel.
The championship the whole ladder points at. The pilots on that start line got there by flying the same tracks, under the same rulebook, that you can fly in Dubuque this season.
Formats, dates and qualification criteria are set by MultiGP and change from season to season. We run what the league runs — check multigp.com for the current season.
There is no engineering department behind the pit table. That is the part of this sport worth protecting.
Flying radio control since 1996 and writing the software behind it for about as long. Started the chapter because Iowa did not have one, and started RotorLab because the questions that come up at a race track — what will this actually pull, how long will it really hang, why did that one come down — deserved better answers than a spreadsheet and a hunch.
Chapter manager and race-day pilot. Builds, tunes and flies the race quads, and does the unglamorous half of running a chapter: setting gates, marshalling, and pulling somebody’s ship out of the long grass in the middle of a heat.
Two pilots is a roster with room in it. If you are reading this and you fly — or you want to — there is a seat.
The five-inch quad — the sport’s archetype, though our gates are open to whatever you race — is a hilariously extreme object. It weighs less than a bag of sugar, makes a thrust-to-weight ratio a fighter jet does not get near, gets from a standstill to sixty miles an hour in about a second, and then runs out of battery before it has been in the air for two minutes.
Everything about racing one is that trade. More power is more heat and less flight time. A lighter pack is a quicker ship and a shorter race. Prop pitch buys you the straight and costs you the corner. There is no setting that is simply better, which is exactly why pilots are still arguing about it over a bench at the end of the day.
| Class | Open — 5″ shown |
|---|---|
| All-up weight | ≈600 g with pack |
| Battery | 6S, 1100–1300 mAh |
| Thrust-to-weight | ≈10:1 static |
| 0–60 mph | ≈1 second |
| Race duration | 90–120 s per pack |
| Video | Analogue or digital HD |
| Pilot sees | Only what the quad sees |
Representative of a typical chapter build. Spec-class limits are set by the MultiGP rulebook.
This is not sponsorship. The team and the product are the same workbench.
The question you ask holding a motor you have not bought yet. It became the RotorLab Builder: real propeller and motor physics, thrust, hover current, flight time — before the parts arrive rather than after.
Race packs lie. The Throttle Simulator flies the mission you are about to fly, at the throttle you are about to hold it at, and tells you where the pack ends instead of where the label says it should.
The worst walk of the day. The Log Analyzer reads the flight controller’s own record and answers it — and it is free, for everybody, with no account, because nobody should have to pay to find out what broke.
RotorLab is a drone operations platform used by commercial and public-safety fleets. The racing is where it gets tested by people with nothing to gain from being polite about it.
Gates and flags go up in the morning. Frequencies get handed out so nobody knocks anybody else’s video out. Practice packs first, then qualifying, then heats. Somebody’s arm snaps and three people hand them a spare before they have finished swearing.
It is louder, friendlier and far less serious than the word “racing” suggests, right up until the start tone. Spectating is free and you do not need to own anything. If you have never seen a race quad go through a gate at full commit, come and stand behind the safety line once.
Join through MultiGP — it is free, it takes a few minutes, and it puts you on the same ladder as every pilot in the league. Then come find us in Dubuque.
Chapter membership, race entry and rankings are handled by MultiGP, not by RotorLab. Fly within the rules of your national aviation authority — in the United States that means registration, remote ID where it applies, and flying under the recreational rule or Part 107 as appropriate.
Flight physics, fleet operations and what shipped — written for people who fly. No spam, unsubscribe in one click.