A robotic car could do something no car driven by a human could ever do: drive without fear of losing their life. Which would allow it to take a lot more risk. Humans continuously balance risk and caution, with racing and other dangerous sports having the 'risk' portion of the equation defined as 'you die'. For a robotic car such a risk would be non-existent.
Sure, but would you watch it for getting adrenaline rush from racing? At some point it would end up as who has the best "non-linear controller" wins (i.e. human is your non-linear controller now), then all of them will have it and all the tweaks will be in some optimization techniques and different objective functions.
And your objective function would have to feature penalty for "killing yourself" (well, do you want to rebuild your car after each turn? I guess not...), so I would expect the cars will be actually pretty slow due to this initially, like Google's own.
Human motorsports face the problem that all physical records were shattered and humans already crossed the edge of their abilities (i.e. driving 250mph on the ovals is the limit before drivers pass out)[1]. So yes, there could be something interesting for a normal human to see that robotic cars suddenly could push 300, 350, 400mph etc. But what would this do to human motorsports? Relegate them to 'meh' category, basically killing the whole sport as humans would look like kids from a kindergarten comparing to robots.
Risk would come in the form of a weighted measure of replacement costs + loss of driving capabilities during the race. e.g. Probability of damage given a certain move/overtake, and if damages does occur taking into account the expected loss of driving capability and or cost.
Also interesting would be to see how AI would implicitly have to take into account game theory with many agents - e.g. If the car in front of 'me' has been highly aggressive in terms of defending against overtakes - what would 'my' best course of action be? Should I signal to him that his strategy is not a deterrence to me trying to overtake?
Racing, aside from the entertainment value it provides to onlookers, also server another important function, namely to showcase cars. I think auto makers will want to keep collisions to a minimum, lest public opinion on the traffic safety of autonomous cars is negatively impacted.
The difference between a civilian driver and a professional driver, is that a pro driver blocks out the fear. You won't go fast if you think about it. Talk to any remotely successful driver.
