Father-Son Duo Build Peregreen 3, Set New Guinness World Record for Fastest Drone

Luke Maximo Bell and his father Mike spent months in a makeshift workshop building a drone that would rewrite the rules of airspeed. On June 22, 2025, the Peregreen 3 crossed the 360.4 mph barrier in Dubai’s Al Qudra desert, setting a new Guinness World Record for the fastest battery-powered remote controlled quadcopter. Outpacing the previous year’s milestone of 347 established by a Swiss team, it was a hard-fought victory that required seven crashes and a run of devastating setbacks to secure.

The Peregreen 3 began life as a wild experiment in their garage, where 3D printers churned out the lightweight plastics that made up the frame until late at night. Every curve and strut came directly from their machines, allowing the Bells to change the design on the fly without having to wait for factory tools to produce the new pieces. The quadcopter’s body is perhaps a touch too light to be stable, but yet light enough to slice through the air like a knife, with four limbs spreading out like a sprinter at the starting line. The motors on the ends of those arms spin propellers so quickly that they’re a blur at full throttle, all fueled by large capacity lithium-polymer batteries incorporated into the core.

Luke’s remote control is loaded with custom software he coded himself, and the signals from it are sent directly to the drone’s onboard receiver, allowing him to modify throttle or tilt in a split second to keep the flight on track. Mike handles the data side, plugging into a laptop that monitors everything from voltage decreases to temperature spikes in real time. They’ve worked together to fine-tune the circuitry to get the most out of the Peregreen 3. They had to strike the perfect balance because if they used too much force, the drone would fly off course or explode in mid-air.

Dubai’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Center stepped in as partners, opening their desert gates and giving the Bells what they truly needed: space to try again in peace with an official thumbs up. The Bells arrived with their prototypes, only to see them come apart beneath the scorching sun. Daytime temperatures soared above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, transforming what little desert air there was into a heat-sucking enemy that sucked the lift right out of them and overheated whatever it could get its hands on. The motors, designed for milder temperatures, just couldn’t keep up, with internal magnets failing and ultimately detaching, sending the rotors into frantic spins that resulted in spectacular crashes.

Those losses forced the Bells to continue evolving and adapting. Early versions used conventional motors, but they swiftly replaced them with beefier ones designed to handle heat, and wrapped them in custom cooling fins printed directly onto the frame as they went. They also modified the software to protect against power surges and keep the entire system from overheating, as well as strengthening the landing skids to take the shock of all the botched recoveries. By the sixth drone, they’d established a routine: fly brief bursts at dawn, review records, tune, and try again by noon. Luke would put on his goggles and stroll down the flight line, feeling the wind right before each departure. Mike, on the other hand, kept a cooler full of spare batteries nearby and swapped them out on the fly, much like a rally pit crew would.

It all came together on that June morning, as Peregreen 3 soared to the sky and simply kept going, GPS equipment on board relentlessly clocking ground speed. The ground personnel marked the course with markers, the Guinness judges were present to oversee the entire run from beginning to end, and the drone was flying its measured path in seconds.
[Source]