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