The CEO of Formula E has promised to pay a quarter of a million dollars (£198,000) to charity if Max Verstappen fails to win the world championship this year.
Verstappen has won the title for the last three years in a row. Every other driver who has achieved that feat has gone on to win four in a row.FE CEO Jeff Dodds made the bet in an interview for the series’ UK broadcaster TNT Sports, saying there was a 99% chance Verstappen would retain his title.
“If he doesn’t win it, there’s 19 other drivers, if any one of the other 19 drivers wins, we’ll give a quarter of a million dollars to the charity of the choice of the other driver that wins,” said Dodds.
He believes there is little chance Verstappen will fail to win the title following his dominant campaign last year. He contrasted the situation with the competitiveness seen in Formula E, where 2023 champion Jake Dennis was one of seven drivers to win the 16 races last year.
“It wouldn’t be the worst day in the office to give a load of money to charity,” Dodds told FE presenter Jermaine Jenas. “But absolutely he is nailed on to win that season.
“For me as a fan of Formula E and Formula 1, I know I’m going to turn up to Sao Paolo [for the next FE round], I run Formula E, you’re in the presentation team there, neither of us have any idea who’s going to win that race. So I’m quite excited by that.
“I know as a Formula 1 fan, the season is about to start, I’ll watch it and the fanfare and everything goes with it, but I absolutely already know who’s winning. You can’t win 19 out of [22] races in one season, go in the off-season, bit of development on the cars, come back for the next one and not win it. I just can’t see it.”
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
Formula 1
- “You need to be more on it”: 12 unheard radio exchanges from the Chinese GP
- F1 CEO Domenicali wants more than six sprint races per year
- Hulkenberg named Audi’s first F1 driver for 2026
- Ricciardo needs to show “head-turning form” for 2025 chance – Horner
- F1 Commission defers decision on points change and approves new rear cameras
Alan Dove
21st February 2024, 13:09
The same chassis will win every single Formula E race, so it doesn’t really quite make sense.
Not knowing who is going to win isn’t exactly the best way to create compelling races either. There needs to be a level of predicatively to expectations can be subverted, but also wins can have value. And when dominance ends we often have David vs Goliath stories.
For someone who works in a sport that has failed at securing a FTA broadcaster int he UK should be aware of narrative principles. The potential of dominance is exactly WHY F1 is such a compelling motorsport. The fact he has got a headline out of a bet on the sport is testament tot hat.
S
21st February 2024, 13:47
Formula E is a spec series – F1 is not (completely)…
The obvious point here, is that one team won’t do all the winning – many teams will win races in FE, because the series is designed to be a competition on the track for the benefit of all who watch it.
As in – the sporting aspect takes priority, rather than the engineering aspect.
F1 has ‘failed’ to secure FTA broadcast partners in most countries for many years now, too…
How does that impact ‘narrative principles’ anyway? That’s what Netflix is for – car racing is for car racing.
Only for some people – certainly not for all. Viewer numbers decline significantly every time it happens, so it’s fair to say that dominance is less a feature and more a bug.
That fact that he put such a large ‘bet’ on who will win the championship before pre-season testing has even completed the first day says everything about where F1 is as a racing and sporting ‘competition’.
I expect that there aren’t many people thinking he’ll have to pay out. I certainly don’t.
Alan Dove
21st February 2024, 14:40
The engineering aspect is the sport and a key component to the feeling of jeopardy within motorsport. F1 hasn’t failed at securing FTA. They have broadcasters tripping over themselves to get it. FE was bounced around C4, BBC and C5 because of a lack of viewers correctly iirc, so not an equivalence at all. This means FE was not compelling and didn’t capture an audience.
Dominance is not a bug either, it’s a feature. F1 is by far the most popular motorsport on the planet. It’s not even close. Close racing doesn’t mean good racing. Good racing requires jeopardy, and F1 has that, formula E doesn’t (at least visually). It doesn’t matter who wins or who doesn’t. It strikes me continually how people get this so wrong so much. When you say you don’t know who’ll win before a weekend you’re actually saying it doesn’t matter who wins.
The comments by the Formula E represent a fundamental lack of understanding about how narrative work within a racing context.
Yellow Baron
21st February 2024, 15:11
Calm down mate, dominance is a bug. Go rewatch last season if you really want to.
Also doesn’t really make sense to compare to Formula E, they’re heavy electric cars that trundle around narrow street sides.
If you want to make a comparison to a spec series make it with indycar. Indycar is also much less a spec series that Formula E. Indycar is great and offers actual racing, competitive too. It is without the highest form of Motorsport on the planet.
Why? Because WEC has BoP and F1 is barely a competition, it’s not close enough. F1 is arguably more an exhibition than a sporting competition.
Alan Dove
21st February 2024, 15:24
1. These are comments by Formula E boss
2. IndyCar isn’t anywhere near as popular as F1 either. It’s not the ‘highest’ form of racing. There champion has been making as many moves to try and get into F1 as you can imagine. If it was the highest form of motorsport you wouldn’t have drivers trying to get out of it, especially no the champions. WHat do you think Andretti is thinking with F1? They want to step down their operations?
Domination isn’t a bug. F1 literally exploded off the back of one the most dominant periods in F1 history with Hamilton and Mercedes. it remains utterly dominant by a considerable margin while Max is dominant. Domination is what made Hamilton a mythical figure within the sport. This is just the facts, the numbers don’t lie.
I am a karter fundamentally. As sport where at the elite level ISN’T spec by the way. I think the likes of Fullerton, Koene, Wilon, De Bruijin, Beggio, Orsini, Rossi, WIlton, Hellberg etc… are as legendary as any F1 driver, but I am not blinded by the fact the technical mechanisms within F1 are the fundamental reason why it is far more popular than any other motorsport.
Yellow Baron
21st February 2024, 16:27
It’s the highest form of racing. Because F1 is not a competition it’s an exhibition of an engineering exercise or ‘competition’. You missed my point entirely.
If F1 becomes more of a spec series overnight, increasing it’s competition on track, it will only increase its popularity over other motorsports. I cannot come close to agreeing that dominance is what makes F1 popular, there’s a bunch of reasons F1 is popular and it’s just not dominance. Like yknow the fastest race cars on the planet, from which every other contributing factor stems.
2021 was one the greatest* seasons in F1. Why? Because dominance.
anon
21st February 2024, 18:30
Alan Dove, when you say that “F1 literally exploded off the back of one the most dominant periods in F1 history” – when you look at the viewing figures, that really isn’t true.
We did see a growth in the viewing figures from 2017 to 2018, but there have been questions about how much of that was genuine growth, and how much of it was an artificial change due to the way in which Liberty Media changed the definition of a viewer – Liberty Media shortened the amount of time that somebody had to watch the broadcast for to just 25% of what it used to be, which would have artificially boosted the viewing figures by including a lot more people that previously weren’t counted.
Even with the definition of a viewer being changed to more favourable criteria, the peak in viewers in 2018 was not hugely impressive by historical standards. The figure claimed for 2018 was 490 million unique viewers – whilst an improvement on 2017, that was still below where the sport was from 2009 to 2013, when it recorded between 500 million and 530 million unique views.
Added to that, the sport hasn’t been able to sustain those viewing figures – the sport saw unique views proceed to drop from 490 million in 2018 to 433 million by 2020, with a small recovery to 445 million in 2021.
Since then, Liberty Media has stopped publishing the unique views – most probably because they showed an unwelcome trend – and switched to cumulative views for the season. However, the trend for that metric has also seen growth stagnate, whilst at the same time Liberty Media has had to admit that the average number of viewers per race has actually declined from 2020 to 2022.
You might claim that “the numbers don’t lie” – maybe they don’t, but there are plenty of ways to change the way that you collect that information to get the answer that you want to arrive at.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
22nd February 2024, 11:56
Yellow baron, I agree, dominance is bad and 2021, the example you made, was a particularly exciting season cause it was a very rare case where we had 2 teams basically equally competitive, and the 2nd of them didn’t just fail on development during the season like ferrari, which made it closer than 2017 and 2018, and the drivers (apart from some hamilton underperformances early on) were pretty similar too.
S
21st February 2024, 16:32
Okay – Australia, for example, (with its own GP and two current drivers) has a broadcasting law which states that many major sporting events/series must be offered to FTA broadcasters first before Pay TV providers can make an offer. Not even one of them wants F1 in any capacity beyond the Melbourne GP – the rest of the season barely exists even on news services outside of Pay TV. Not exactly tripping over themselves, as you say.
FE, on the other hand, is on FTA in full (not live – but that just makes it at available at a better time for the timezone anyway) – recently moving from a government-funded channel to a commercial FTA channel.
Again with the comparisons? No other series requires that it reaches as many eyeballs as F1, nor travels to as many places and holds as many events as F1 needs to simply to sustain itself. F1’s financial footprint makes this absolutely necessary. Indycar is a domestic series, FE is deliberately smaller in scale and focused on completely different things than F1, Super Formula is also domestic…. Everything else with open wheels is F3 or lower.
It doesn’t matter who wins – in any series. It’s not going to change the world, is it…
A win in Indycar is arguably a greater achievement than winning in F1, certainly from a driving perspective anyway – that’s the sport; the unpredictable/unplanned bit which happens on the day and not in the factory several months ago.
He’s actually saying it doesn’t matter. The feeling people get from a predictable procession with a prior-known outcome is not comparable to the joy and reward they get from watching something fluid and unexpected.
Which scenario do you think they’ll be thinking and talking about days and weeks later? The one that confirmed their expectations, or the one that actually made them feel good?
Ciaran (@ciaran)
21st February 2024, 13:27
Wow, a spec series has closer racing than a non-spec series! Never heard that one before!
Sad grandstanding from someone who has failed their series badly.
Tristan (@skipgamer)
21st February 2024, 13:37
If he can afford to make that bet, he should do it either way…
hoshino (@hoshino)
21st February 2024, 14:15
My thoughts exactly, I wonder why interviewer didn’t ask him about that…
S
21st February 2024, 16:36
He probably will – and that will make him and his series look good too in comparison to F1 (to the people that are influenced by this sort of thing).
At the same time – he’s also probably put another big bet on Verstappen winning again and profiting from that too.
José
21st February 2024, 14:22
This is really ridiculous. So he bets in the favorite, expecting to win and not have to donate a cent? And does he expect people to see this behavior like a good thing? If he has that amount of money to donate, just donate. Just do the right thing! Why doesn’t he say that will donate if Max WIN?
This is really ridiculous. So he bets in the favorite, expecting to win and not have to donate a cent? And expects to people see this behavior like a good thing? If he has this amount of money to donate, just donate. Just do the right thing! Why doesn’t he say that he’ll donate if Max WINS?
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
22nd February 2024, 11:58
There’s good reason for that, he doesn’t want always the same person to win, he knows he will win, so if by a miracle someone else wins he’s happy and he donates, I’d have the same reasoning.
praxis (@praxis)
21st February 2024, 14:25
It’d have been better PR had he offered a quarter of a million dollars to the charity of the choice of whoever winning the 2024 F1(better yet, FE) championship.
Fer no.65 (@fer-no65)
21st February 2024, 15:19
What a horrible thing to say…
Oxnard (@montalvo)
21st February 2024, 16:32
So you’re pledging 250k to a charity, but only because the odds are really small you’ll ever have to pay..
RH
21st February 2024, 17:10
I see he is not really in it to donate to charity.
David B
21st February 2024, 18:18
Bit of a pig thing to say. If you can afford to bet that money away to charity then just do it anyway.
Jere (@jerejj)
21st February 2024, 19:21
What a promise. I’m looking forward to the outcome within the October-December phase.
SjaakFoo (@sjaakfoo)
21st February 2024, 19:29
The problem with Formula E is that they seem to be in denial of their own failure to create an enticing championship. There’s a reason nobody’s watching. There’s a reason no TV stations are lining up in bidding wars for your TV rights. There’s a reason your race highlights on YouTube don’t even get 3 quarters of the way to 100.000 views. Nobody likes to watch your product.
The fact that they think the sheer randomness of their competition where dozens of people are in the championship hunt and champions are crowned having one maybe one or two races a season is a good thing shows how little they understand about what makes racing exciting. There’s no real competition in Formula E, it plays out more like a random crapshoot. Through a combination of bad spec car design, bad tires, and bad tracks, along with a random “who will run into who and crash them out of the race” element, it’s just doesn’t feel like you’re looking at a competition to find out who the best driver and who the best constructor of Formula E are. There’s nobody to really root for, there’s no season long nail biting competition. There’s just “we’ll see which driver wins this race and the end of the season we’ll crown someone champion” and that’s that. I feel no incentive to follow along, and I especially don’t feel like paying Discovery+ several Euro a month to watch it.
When I watch Formula 1 and Red Bull and Verstappen dominate because they’re the cream of the crop, that feels like I’m watching an accomplishment. When McLaren fights their way from backmarkers to P2 team during a season, that feels like I’m watching an accomplishment. When Alonso and Aston Martin make it to the podium after years of struggling in the (back of) the midfield, that feels like an accomplishment.
But when Stoffel Vandoorne becomes Formula E champion with one race win, that feels like a paper accomplishment. I’d much rather see Verstappen become champion with 19 race wins, or Verstappen become champion in the final race of the season with only one other driver challenging him and them sharing the majority of wins between themselves than watch Formula E have a new race winner every weekend. Where’s the fun in that?
X1Znet (@x1znet)
21st February 2024, 21:53
Probably too long for Comment of the Day, but this would get my vote (if we got to vote for CotD).
S
22nd February 2024, 1:51
As opposed to F1?
The FE championship is usually not decided until the final event… Is that not season-long..?
At which point did it become apparent who was going to be champion in F1 last year? The season before, really, and confirmation came after just the first few events.
That’s exactly how all championship seasons work. Should they do something different?
What it says is that he was the better performer of the lot over the course of a highly competitive season. Obviously you don’t think he’s such a great driver, despite his success in non-F1 cars (his time in F1 was largely destroyed by the lack of competitiveness of the cars he was given).
Verstappen or Hamilton ticking boxes at every event in in F1 in what is clearly a faster car for them over their competitors is not a massive accomplishment from a driving/sporting perspective – it is primarily an engineering achievement by other (mostly anonymous) people and their computers, over a long period of time beforehand.
It’s OK – F1 ‘fans’ have long been overly protective of their idea of F1 and what they think F1 represents, and I don’t expect that will change in the near future either, despite F1 becoming more and more like all the other series in so many ways.
X1Znet (@x1znet)
21st February 2024, 21:52
The man is jealous that F1 testing gets more attention than FE racing.