Brazil’s triple Formula One champion Nelson Piquet must pay $953,050 in moral damages for racist and homophobic comments against Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton, a Brazilian court ruled on Friday.
Hamilton called for action to change ‘archaic mindsets’ after footage of the interview surfaced on social media last June.
‘These old voices are, you know, whether subconsciously or consciously, do not agree that people like me, for example, should be in a sport like this, do not agree women should be here,’ Hamilton said in the wake of the controversy that rocked the sport last summer.
‘Discrimination is not something we should be giving a platform. We need people to be bringing people together. We are all the same and the comments we are seeing are not helpful.’
What did Nelson Piquet say about Lewis Hamilton?
On June 28, 2022, a clip showed Piquet using racist slurs on a Brazilian podcast. He said: ‘The n******* put the car in the wrong way and didn’t let the other driver swerve.
‘The n******* put the car in the wrong way on the corner, it’s because you don’t know the curve.
‘It’s a very high curve, there is no way to pass two cars and there’s no way you can put the car aside. He did [Verstappen] dirty. His luck was that only the other one was gone.’
In July, further comments emerged in which show Piquet used homophobic and racist language.
Appearing to take a swipe at F1 driver Nico Rosberg and his father Keke, Pique said: ‘Keke? He was a s***! Zero value.
‘His son [Nico] won the championship. The ‘n’ was [more focused on] giving a* at that time. He was kinda bad.’
Piquet, 70, apologised to the British driver and said his comments had been mistranslated. Piquet’s daughter Kelly is Verstappen’s partner.
In another clip which surfaced later, Piquet used racist and homophobic language against Hamilton in a podcast interview when describing how Hamilton missed out on the 2016 championship to Nico Rosberg.
Hamilton, who was awarded honorary Brazilian citizenship last June, is the sport’s only Black driver.
The charges were brought by four human rights groups, including Brazil’s National LGBT+ Alliance, which wanted Piquet to pay 10 million Brazilian Reals for alleged moral damages.
In his decision, Judge Pedro Matos de Arrudo said the amount of compensation was given ‘in the sense that one should not only appreciate the reparative function of civil liability but also (and perhaps mainly) the punitive function so that, as a society, we can someday be free from the pernicious acts that are racism and homophobia’.
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