Everyone’s talking about Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen entering the Formula One season finale tied in points, but let us not forget that we have some other battles taking place further down the grid to earn a handful of those coveted points — and the prize money that comes with them.
I know, I know. It doesn’t sound as exciting. But prize money is prize money, and everyone wants some of that.
In case you’ve forgotten, F1 divvies up prize money in a weird way that can be a pain in the ass to explain. Basically: a certain amount of prize money is equally distributed among the top 10 teams in the series, and any other team gets a participation fund. Another amount of money is divided up based on a team’s finishing position, with the first-place team getting more money than the second place team and so on down the board. Ferrari gets a little extra money just for being Ferrari.
So: it benefits the team to finish higher in the championship standings, which means their drivers need to finish well. So you can imagine that there’s some strong incentive here for drivers to duke it out on the track no matter where they’re finishing.
Let’s look at what’s on the table for the finale at Abu Dhabi.
