Formula E CEO Offers To Give $250,000 To Charity If Someone Other Than Max Verstappen Wins F1 Title

A new Formula 1 season is coming our way in a week and a half, and right now, teams are in Bahrain putting their 2024 cars through their paces in pre-season testing.

The one thing every fan is hoping for from the 2024 season is simple: please let it be a little more interesting than the 2023 campaign that saw Max Verstappen win 19 of the 22 races (Red Bull as a team won 21 with Sergio Perez winning two).

While this is what a lot of people want, most observers would be willing to bet that it will be another dominant year for Verstappen and Red Bull. Even the CEO of Formula E — the all-electric single-seater series — is convinced that Verstappen has the title locked up.

"99% he gets that trophy," Formula E CEO Jeff Dodds said of Verstappen. 

In fact, as an incentive for someone — anyone — to take the fight to Verstappen, Dodds pledged that Formula E would make a charitable donation of $250,000 to the winning driver if his name isn't Max Verstappen.

" So there's 19 other drivers, if any one of the other 19 drivers wins it will give a quarter of a million dollars to the charity of the choice of the other driver wins."

That's a lot of money and as Dodds pointed out making such a large charitable donation wouldn't be the "worst day in the office."

However, he's making a point with this offer: that Formula 1 is far less predictable than a lot of other racing series around the globe, like, oh, I don't know… Formula E.

Dodds noted that even though he runs Formula E, he'll show up to the circuit in Sao Paulo for Round 4 of the Formula E season and not have any inkling of who will win.

He's not kidding. Through the first three races, the series has three different winners, each of whom races for a different team.

Is Dodds right to be so certain of Verstappen victory? Well, let's look at the first day of testing in Bahrain. You can't put a whole lot of stock in it because teams are running different programs, but here are the results from the first day of running.

Yeah, you read that correctly; Verstappen was over a second clear of the next fastest lap which belonged to McLaren's Lando Norris.

Again, take testing with a grain of salt. We'll get more of a sense of how good the RB20 is when Sergio Perez drives it on Day 2. However, as Dodds pointed out, you can't expect a team to win 19 of 22 races and then take a step backward.

"You can't win 19 out of (22) races in one season, go in the offseason, bit of develop on the cars come back for the next one and not win it," he said. I just can't see it."