DeLorean Joins Flying-Car Racing After Its 2024 Alpha5 Comeback Missed Deadline

DeLorean is heading into flying-car racing before completing its promised return to road-car production. The company will represent the United States in Airspeeder’s 2026-27 International Series, according to the official team announcement, with its first race scheduled for the season opener in November 2026. Meanwhile, the Alpha5 production car that DeLorean said could arrive in 2024 remains undelivered.

That contrast gives the racing announcement more weight than a conventional branding deal. DeLorean introduced the Alpha5 concept in 2022 as the car that would return the nameplate to production. The Italdesign-bodied, all-wheel-drive four-seater featured the brand’s signature gullwing doors, while DeLorean estimated 300 miles of range and acceleration from zero to 60 mph in 2.99 seconds. The stated 2024 arrival passed without the promised production comeback.

The Airspeeder entry puts DeLorean back in front of an audience interested in ambitious transportation technology, but its initial engineering role is narrower than the word “constructor” may suggest. Airspeeder calls DeLorean the championship’s first American constructor, yet the team is expected to race the standardized Airspeeder Mk3C during the 2026-27 season. DeLorean’s responsibility for that first campaign is the aircraft’s visual identity rather than its underlying airframe, propulsion or flight-control engineering.

For a new racing series, standardized hardware has practical value. Keeping teams on the same base aircraft reduces the number of technical variables that organizers must manage while they establish sporting procedures, flight operations and safety systems. It also places more of the competitive burden on pilots, team execution and the common aircraft package instead of starting an expensive development contest immediately.

But that structure makes DeLorean’s “constructor” designation feel thin for the debut season. In established motorsport language, a constructor generally has a meaningful role in creating the vehicle. Applying the term to a team that initially supplies the look rather than the core aircraft can blur the boundary between an engineering participant and a branded entrant.

The planned next step is more substantial. Beginning with the 2027-28 season, DeLorean intends to develop its own race aircraft in collaboration with engineering students from the University of California, Berkeley and Georgia Tech. If that program proceeds, the constructor label would extend beyond graphics into aircraft design and analysis. Airspeeder has not yet revealed the debut team’s aircraft presentation, pilots or complete sporting program, leaving those details to be announced before the November opener.

The competition itself is built around electric vertical-takeoff and landing aircraft flying through three-dimensional courses defined by virtual gates. Airspeeder promotes the series as a development environment for electric propulsion, advanced flight controls and AI-enabled safety systems. Racing can generate useful operational experience, but the announcement does not establish a path from the competition aircraft to a consumer DeLorean flying car.

The promotional material also deserves a measured reading. Carscoops noted that a pit-stop image associated with the DeLorean announcement repeated an earlier Airspeeder team photo. That comparison has not been independently verified here, so it cannot establish whether the image represents new DeLorean-specific hardware. The officially confirmed aircraft design remains unrevealed.

For DeLorean, the next two seasons now carry different tests. The November debut will show how the name is presented on Airspeeder’s existing Mk3C platform. The proposed 2027-28 aircraft would show whether DeLorean can turn the constructor title into a genuine engineering contribution. Until then, the company’s newest visible vehicle program is an airborne racing entry built around common hardware, while the Alpha5 road car promised for 2024 is still waiting for its production comeback.

By David Whitaker — Associate editor for AMI’s aerospace and drone systems desk, translating flight systems, aircraft programs, spaceflight, and UAV developments into accessible technical stories.