Nelson Piquet fined £780,000 for racist and homophobic slurs at Lewis Hamilton

NELSON PIQUET must pay £780,000 for racist and homophobic comments made against Sir Lewis Hamilton, a Brazilian court ruled on Friday.

Piquet used a racial slur referring to the Brit F1 icon in a November 2021 interview.

Piquet was commenting on Hamilton’s British Grand Prix crash with Max Verstappen, who is dating Piquet’s daughter, Kelly.

Hamilton called for action to change “archaic mindsets” after footage of the interview surfaced on social media last June.

The Brit legend wrote on Twitter at the time: “It’s more than language. These archaic mindsets need to change and have no place in our sport.

“I’ve been surrounded by these attitudes and targeted my whole life. There has been plenty of time to learn. Time has come for action.”

Piquet then issued a grovelling apology to Hamilton.

He said that his comments had been mistranslated.

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.

And a Brazilian court ruled he must now pay over three quarters of a million pounds in moral damages.

Hamilton, who was awarded honorary Brazilian citizenship last June, is F1’s only Black driver.

The charges were brought by four human rights groups, including Brazil’s National LGBT+ Alliance, which wanted Piquet to pay £1.6million 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”.

Piquet himself is a three-time F1 world champion.