What happens when the boss of a trail-blazing global racing series teams up with a tech entrepreneur with $500million burning a hole in his back pocket? Driverless car racing. Obviously.

“For me, the motor industry is going in three directions: electric, connected and driverless,” says Formula E chief Alejandro Agag, when we ask him about the future of the sport and the headline-grabbing Roborace initiative. “We are already electric. Fine. We have to be more connected. We’re working on it. And then – driverless. We announced Roborace, which is a great addition to our package. It puts us where the future is going, where the industry is investing billions.”

Autonomous vehicle technology and motor racing don’t immediately sound like natural bedfellows. Top level motorsport generally tries to outlaw any really clever computer-controlled “driver aids” such as traction control, launch control, torque vectoring and active aero. Could Roborace bridge the gap?

First, the basics. What is Roborace, who are the competitors and who’s putting up the cash? “It is a global driverless car championship, a partnership between Kinetik and Formula E,” explains Denis Sverdlov, the Russian businessman whose Kinetik investment firm is also behind the electric truck start-up Charge. “Roborace is a chance for us to revolutionise the automotive sector; it will provide a competitive platform for the autonomous driving solutions that are now being developed by many large industrial automotive and technology players as well as top tech universities. The series will be regulated by the FIA.”

Ten teams will compete in the new series, which will run as a support category to Formula E. The first race is expected to take place sometime in Formula E’s third season (roughly October 2016 through summer 2017). Formula E teams may enter but Sverdlov expects a new crop of talent to be attracted by Roborace. “We expect to see a new generation of teams that have not previously been present in Formula E,” he says. “This is one of the main ways in which we are going to bring something different to Formula E and its audience. We also hope that some of the Formula E teams will take up the challenge to get involved in Roborace.”

The intention is to provide all teams with a spec driverless racing car which teams are then free to programme. “Teams will provide their own autonomous driving algorithms and corresponding software, which should work on top of the Roborace car driverless platform,” Sverdlov explains. “We would like to see all the companies that are working on driverless technologies get involved in the championship. Some are more adventurous than others; some want to demonstrate proper driverless conditions and show driverless technology operating in extreme conditions.”

The challenge should not be underestimated. Simply getting a car to go around a track safely without a driver has already been done. But trying to get the car to race, compete, judge where it could overtake or where it has to back out of a move, work out in real time where it could cut a kerb without being penalised by stewards, find the limits of grip and physics in changeable conditions and push beyond those limits to win – in other words, to think like a racing driver – is all unexplored territory. It’s a place where human ingenuity is going to be just as important as the artificial intelligence it births.

In terms of budget, plan for around the million dollar mark, says Sverdlov: “Our current estimation is that there will be a minimum requirement of at least a million dollars in order to fulfil the potential of the race. The teams would need to buy a car for the race. The exception to this is for the crowd-sourced team, which is sponsored by Roborace.”

Details on the actual racing cars themselves are not yet publicly available (we’d like to see a miniaturised McLaren P1 or Jaguar C-X75, running purely on electric power and with active wings – but that’s just us), but it’s the software that is the focus of the new sport. For good reason, too: Sverdlov hopes that the code being written for competition will feed directly into autonomous vehicles being developed across the world, as well as going some way towards reassuring public and politicians that such vehicles can be introduced without compromising safety.

“Soon all cars will be driverless: Roborace will act as a catalyst by making driverless cars a part of everyday life,” he says. “The championship is a platform where teams will compete with each other to create the best algorithms and thus improve the efficiency of their vehicles. We are confident that these algorithms, developed and deployed under the extreme conditions of the race track, can be applied in ordinary road conditions later, as they would be proven to be capable of supporting the safest and the most efficient vehicles in the world. We know from looking at how technological developments in Formula 1 filtered down to ordinary cars that developments at the cutting edge of the automotive sector can quickly impact on the rest of the market.”

The announcement late last year of the new project caused something of a media storm but it has not been without its high profile detractors. Many have accused Roborace of being nothing more than a gimmick, a marketing-driven money-making scheme masquerading as motorsport (no comments, please, about this point could apply equally to conventional motorsport too).

Sverdlov and Agag disagree. “Roborace will provide its viewers with a fascinating spectacle as the world’s best minds will compete with each other to create the fastest and most efficient race cars around,” says the Russian. “Now, the whole racing team will be at the centre of attention throughout the competition, whereas previously attention could only focus on drivers.”

Agag swashbuckles: “We are the first ones to do something. Other people could have announced a driverless championship. But they didn’t. I don’t know why. Probably they didn’t think of it or they didn’t dare. But we did.”

Those who fear that Roborace might not make for an entertaining spectacle should remember that, without the soft gooey centre of a human driver, the vehicles could potentially be much, much faster than normal racing cars. Say hello to torque vectoring, traction control, launch control, active suspension, shape-shifting aero and all sorts of other technological trickery that is outlawed elsewhere in motorsport but which is readily available in many modern road cars.

“Obviously, these tools are banned in motorsports where the competition is between human drivers,” Sverdlov says. “In Roborace, however, the competition is entirely between ‘artificial’ driving technologies, so all of the aspects that you mention should work here as competitive advantages for those teams who know how to use them best.”

That raises a tantalising prospect: because Roborace will sit under the FIA umbrella and will be very closely related to Formula E, could we soon see these technologies jumping across to the electric racing cars? Our fingers are crossed.