Red Bull chief Christian Horner revealed he was ‘appalled’ by Nelson Piquet’s racist abuse of seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton. Footage emerged of Piquet using the N-word to describe Hamilton from an interview recorded in 2021.
The 69-year-old - whose daughter Kelly dates Hamilton’s rival Max Verstappen - was discussing the Englishman’s fierce battle with Verstappen at the 2021 British Grand Prix. The Silverstone clash saw the Red Bull man crash into the side of the track which resulted in a 10-second penalty for Hamilton.
In a grovelling apology, Piquet said: “What I said was ill-thought-out, and I make no defence for it, but I will clarify that the term used is one that has widely and historically been used colloquially in Brazilian-Portuguese as a synonym for ‘guy’ or ‘person’ and was never intended to offend.
“I would never use the word I have been accused of in some translations.” Since the emergence of Piquet’s shocking comments, the three-time world champion has been heavily criticised, and this has been echoed by Horner.
The Red Bull boss’ condemnation came just days after his team sacked disgraced junior driver Juri Vips for using racist language. He said: “First of all, we are appalled by Nelson’s comments and it’s from an interview from some time ago.
“But we’ve obviously had an instance with one of our young drivers earlier, or at the end of last week, and we took very definitive action when he made a racist comment. And so we took action and we immediately removed him from the team.
"So we put out a statement about Juri and this one comes out and we felt we had made a very strong statement through [the] action of actually dropping Juri from the team – [we are] not in any way condoning any form of racism or discrimination.” Following Piquet’s comments Red Bull failed to release a statement in relation to the Brazilian’s racial slur.
However, after already addressing the discriminative language of Juri, Horner felt this was an efficient enough stance by his team against racism. He added: “We put out a statement earlier in the day about Juri, about having zero tolerance for racism, and to then put out another statement about Nelson Piquet… Of course, we are fully behind Lewis, we are fully signed up to the Hamilton Commission and we felt actions sometimes talk louder than words, and the action we too.”
