Photo: Lukas Raich, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
On September 16, Max Verstappen is going to start a race in last place on purpose, against 100 people who have never shared a grid with a four-time world champion, and Red Bull is betting that watching him dig his way out is worth a global broadcast slot. The event is called “Max vs 100,” and once you get past the reality-TV title card, there’s a genuinely interesting piece of racing logistics underneath it.
Disney+ and ESPN announced the event on August 25 as a joint production with Red Bull, streaming live worldwide on Disney+ and via the ESPN App for ESPN Unlimited subscribers in the US, with a same-day tape-delayed airing on ESPN2. It’s a closed set, no spectators on site, built on a circuit constructed specifically for the occasion on the grounds at Silverstone, separate from the Grand Prix layout. The premise: 101 karts on track at once, Verstappen starts at the back, and the show only works if he can slice through the entire field before time runs out.
That number matters more than it looks. Getting 101 karts moving safely on one circuit at the same time isn’t a scaled-up club race, it’s a traffic-management problem before it’s a racing problem. Organizers built the track specifically to make that scale of grid possible, with marshaling, run-off and sightlines all needing solutions before anyone worried about lap times. The build fell to David Terrien, a French former karting world champion who now designs circuits for a living, credited as Race Director for the event.
Verstappen isn’t walking into this cold. Long before Red Bull, he was one of the more feared names in European karting, and in 2013 he became the youngest-ever CIK-FIA World Champion by winning the KZ title at 15, a record still cited whenever people argue about which F1 drivers actually grew up racing wheel-to-wheel versus which ones grew up in simulators. That’s the entire premise of “Max vs 100”: drop him back into the discipline that built his race craft, except this time the field isn’t thirty junior karters, it’s 100 people with wildly different skill levels. Verstappen described the return simply: “you quite naturally get back into things.”
The field is what separates this from a normal exhibition. It isn’t a grid of quietly talented amateurs; it’s a mix of Red Bull-sponsored extreme-sport athletes, ultrarunner Arda Saatci, basketball trick-shot specialist Chris “Lethal Shooter” Matthews, and freestyle mountain biker Matt Jones, alongside streamers and content creators including TheGrefg, Caedrel and TheDonato, plus additional creators, personalities and members of the public. None of them are professional racing drivers, which is the point: the entire show is built around whether raw numbers and chaos can offset a hundred-driver skill gap.
Red Bull isn’t treating this as a stunt shot on a GoPro. Sebastian Job, Red Bull’s sim racing driver, was brought in to stress-test the format ahead of time, and the broadcast, produced by the UK production company Whisper with British comedian Mo Gilligan hosting, is built around live telemetry overlays, interactive graphics and drone camera work, plus a wrinkle that actual racing rarely allows: Verstappen will be able to talk directly to his rivals over radio during the race. For a discipline that spends most of its broadcast budget on fixed trackside cameras, wiring up in-race chatter between a four-time world champion and 100 amateurs is a legitimately new piece of production.
The timing isn’t incidental, either. Verstappen heads into this off a 2026 Formula 1 season that hasn’t produced a win, even as he recently signed a Red Bull contract through 2030, and one where the team’s own admission is that its car’s problem isn’t outright pace so much as repeatability from one weekend to the next. A global entertainment special built entirely around Verstappen’s dominance is a useful reminder to casual viewers of why he’s worth four titles and a long-term contract, even in a year the trophy case hasn’t grown. It’s the same instinct behind his farewell Delft blue helmet at Zandvoort: when the on-track results go quiet, Red Bull leans harder into the driver as a brand.
For fans, the practical details are simple: mark September 16, and know this isn’t pay-per-view, it’s part of a standard Disney+ subscription internationally, with ESPN2 covering the US delay. Don’t expect a stopwatch-perfect motorsport product; expect something closer to a live-action video game, with the tension coming from whether Verstappen can actually clear 100 karts before the segment runs out of road. Whether or not he does, the exercise says something honest about where motorsport broadcasting is headed: pure competition draws a core audience, but pairing a genuine racing pedigree with a made-for-TV format is how you get people who don’t watch F1 to tune in on a Wednesday night for go-karts.
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