World's Fastest Drone Reclaims Guinness Record at 657.59 km/h

South African builder Luke Bell (working with his father, Mike) is back on top: His Peregreen V4 has reclaimed the Guinness title for the world's fastest drone, clocked at an official 657.59 km/h (408.60 mph) in Cape Town on 11 December 2025.

The Return: Peregreen V4 on Video

Bell’s video is a rare treat: it is not just “look how fast,” but a walk through trade-offs, failed ideas, and the kind of unglamorous test work that makes extreme performance repeatable. It also provides context for how the record changed hands recently, including the period when Australian aerospace engineer Benjamin Biggs held the crown before the V4 run.

What Guinness Actually Recorded

The record category is “fastest ground speed by a battery-powered remote-controlled (RC) quadcopter,” and the official record entry lists the achieved speed, location, and date. The headline number matters, but so does the methodology: speed attempts are typically averaged across runs in opposite directions to reduce wind advantage, so the vehicle has to perform consistently rather than producing a single tailwind spike. You can check the current record details in the official record entry.

Engineering Lessons Hidden Inside a Viral Speed Video

At these speeds, drag dominates. Small shape changes, surface finish, and protrusions that are irrelevant on a normal FPV rig become first-order design variables. Bell has described using CFD tools to iterate on the outer shell, then physically sanding, polishing, and refining surfaces to reduce drag. That combination of simulation and shop-floor reality is familiar to anyone who has tuned an enclosure, duct, or heatsink for real-world performance.

Powertrain work is just as unglamorous. In reporting on the project, Bell is shown building a thrust test rig using strain gauges and an Arduino-based data capture setup to compare motor options under repeatable conditions, and using thermal imaging to keep an eye on heating during runs. If you can’t measure thrust, current, temperature, and vibration in a controlled setup, you are guessing. A good overview of that side of the build is available in a detailed build breakdown.

The other takeaway is systems engineering. A speed run is a short, brutal duty cycle that stresses batteries, ESCs, wiring, fasteners, and sensor fusion all at once. Keeping a quad stable at hundreds of kilometres per hour is less about “more power” and more about margins: mechanical stiffness, clean sensor data, reliable logging, and a flight controller setup that will not twitch when the airframe starts behaving like a small missile.

If you want more drone-not-toy content, Elektor has a solid archive of builds and experiments in its drone projects archive.

Beyond Bragging Rights

Records are fun, but the useful part is the workflow: fast iteration enabled by modern fabrication (including 3D printing), CFD-informed geometry changes, instrumented bench testing, and disciplined validation runs. That same toolchain scales down nicely to everyday engineering problems, from improving a fan duct to verifying a motor-and-prop combo for an outdoor robot.