Rainbow Six Siege is replacing rifles with racing drones for three weeks

Ubisoft launches Wasteland Circuit in Rainbow Six Siege on September 23. The official Year 11 Season 3 roadmap lists the limited-time event through October 13.

More importantly, Ubisoft describes it as Siege's first-ever drone racing event.

The drone does not need to find the bomb site this time

The mode puts drones directly against one another across a series of races built around obstacles, shortcuts and speed.

Balloons are spread across the course. Item balloons provide ways to interfere with opponents, while boost balloons give the player's own drone additional speed.

Each race awards points based on finishing position. Winning one heat therefore does not automatically win the event: the highest accumulated score across the circuit determines the overall winner.

Rainbow Six Siege has temporarily discovered motorsport. It simply happens to use cameras with wheels.

The detour comes with a dieselpunk look

Wasteland Circuit also abandons the familiar utilitarian drone aesthetic for a post-apocalyptic presentation. Ubisoft is attaching a dieselpunk-themed Wasteland Circuit cosmetic collection to the event.

An exclusive drone skin can also be earned through Twitch by watching three hours of eligible Rainbow Six Siege streams during the promotional window.

A limited DRON-E Twitch chat badge is available alongside it.

The event arrives immediately after 3v3 Arcade

Wasteland Circuit follows another temporary variation on Siege's standard format. Operation Split Fire's 3v3 Arcade ran from September 8 through September 21.

That mode retained Bomb rules while shrinking the teams, cutting the Preparation Phase to 30 seconds and removing Operator bans.

It also introduced Operator attrition: after a team won a round with an Operator, that character could not be selected again by the team for the rest of that match.

Split Fire is therefore using two very different experiments in succession: first a compressed version of tactical Siege, then something that barely tries to resemble a conventional Siege match at all.

Split Fire is still primarily Noor's season

Operation Split Fire launched September 1 with Noor, a two-speed, two-armor Egyptian Defender designed in part to disrupt shield-based pushes.

His Horus Lance Launcher carries five projectiles that can embed themselves in ballistic shields or various surfaces before emitting jets of flame.

When one hits a shield Operator, the target has to move the protection aside to remove the projectile before the flames become lethal. That brief exposure is the opening Noor and his teammates are intended to exploit.

The lances can also provide area denial through walls, floors, hatches, Castle barricades and Azami Kiba Barriers.

Villa has changed downstairs as well

The season moved Villa's Living Room/Library bomb site into the basement and substantially rebuilt that floor.

The garage is now contained inside the structure instead of outside it, changing eastern approaches and creating new rotations for both attackers and defenders.

Stadium Alpha, Stadium Bravo and House have also received modernized visual and destructibility updates.

The next competitive addition is considerably more serious

Operation Split Fire still has its Legend Division scheduled for mid-season. The solo-queue playlist is aimed at top-level players and carries strict eligibility requirements involving rank, reputation and account security.

On PC, Ubisoft requires Secure Boot, HVCI and TPM 2.0 through ShieldGuard Secure, plus two-factor authentication.

The top 100 regional players can earn a charm reflecting their final leaderboard position.

Before Siege returns to measuring who belongs among its most competitive players, it has three weeks to answer a stranger question: who is actually best at driving a reconnaissance drone?