With too good performance
![How Räikkönen nearly bankrupted an F1 team](https://topgear.static-vds.nl/uploads/2021/07/kimi-raikkonen-f1-team-failliet.jpg)
Kimi Räikkönen is the most experienced F1 driver of all time. No one has completed as many GPs as the man of few words. If you have that record, it also means that you have to be a fast driver. Now the Finn is almost retiring, but in 2012 and 2013 he was still one of the fastest drivers at the time. In fact, his performance was so good that he nearly bankrupted Lotus F1 Team. But how can you bankrupt a team if you just collect tons of points?
A big bonus per point
The problem for Lotus was precisely in those points. The team was founded in 2012. As with many new teams, they don’t expect to be competitive right from the first Grand Prix. Usually you need a run-up of a few seasons. To lure Kimi Räikkönen to the team, they therefore offered him a bonus of 50,000 euros per point in his contract. What can go wrong?
The car turned out to be fast in the first season. Kimi was on the podium fifteen times in two seasons and managed to collect a total of 390 points in the same period. Where the team boss was cheering, the team bookkeeper will be shocked. The total number of points meant that the team owed Kimi 19.5 million euros in bonuses. That was in addition to his standard pay slip.
How do you cough up 19.5 million as a small team?
All the money that the team brought in with the fourth places in the constructors’ championships could therefore be paid directly to Räikkönen. But a team also needs money for other things, so they couldn’t pay their driver right away. That left Lotus F1 in years of loans, debt and difficulties. The takeover of the team by Renault in 2016 only brought an end to the financial malaise. It seems that Raikkönen still has to receive 6 million euros from the bonus, but that he did not claim that amount at the time because then the team would really go bankrupt and all the people of the team would be out of work. The iceman apparently he has a warm heart.