In the event, Georgia needn’t have worried. Her new trim settings caught her out, sending her quad lurching to the left. Full power saved her from an embarrassing scrape with the floor but left her too high with no forward momentum.

Van Hooten’s orange-lit drone took the lead, with a good angle off the ground and a cautious passage through the centre of gate one.

Georgia was far enough back to see the purple-lit drone clip the gate, flip upwards and smash into the light-green one. The two drones clattered to the floor, light green dead on impact, the pilot of purple trying a relaunch, but getting nowhere with a broken prop. Pink had avoided the carnage by ducking under the gate, but that would add a five-second penalty to the pilot’s time. Disqualification if he missed two more.

Georgia went high through gates one and two and entered the laser tunnel sixth out of six runners, needing first or second to make the next day’s final. Footage of drones in the brightly lit laser tunnel made spectacular video, but pilots loathed glare that made it easy to drift into the tunnel wall or clatter a rival.

Over the next few gates, Georgia dropped back until it felt like she was in solo practice. She glimpsed the four drones fighting for second on longer straights, with Van Hooten out of sight in the lead.

But Georgia had been flying drones since she was seven and she’d learned a lot about her rival pilots. Most saw themselves as gladiators, bragging about their quad’s top speed and overestimating their ability to consistently throw unstable craft through the bendy bits.

By age ten, Georgia regularly chewed up teen boys, whose quads were blindingly fast but had the steering finesse of a house brick. The pilots in this race weren’t kids, but Georgia was getting a feel for the trim adjustments she’d made and hoped to make up ground as the course entered its most difficult section.

Gate eleven was a skylight in the warehouse roof. The best-funded drone teams used military-spec camera arrays that gave a stable image from night vision to blinding sunlight. The camera on Georgia’s drone cost £35 and left her blind for a quarter-second as its sensor adjusted to daylight.

There were two tight gates on the factory roof, followed by a three-storey drop to ground level. From here, the course went through four juggernaut trailers parked in a W-shape. Each truck was entered at the rear, but the exits varied. Some in the side, some the roof and the tightest of all through a narrow blue tunnel.

Georgia moved nearer the pack through the first three trucks and was close enough to witness the red drone smash into the inside of the fourth truck, disintegrating with such force that it had to be signal dropout, not pilot error.