Nelson Piquet was fined $950,000 for his racist comments against Lewis Hamilton

The retired Formula 1 champion Nelson Piquet was fined $950,000 for “moral damage” after his racist and homophobic comments towards Lewis Hamilton.

In 2021, the 70-year-old Brazilian called up the seven-time F1 champion “neguinho”, a racially offensive term meaning “little black man”. In another interview Piquet used racist and homophobic language.

A Basel court ordered Piquet to pay five million Brazilian reais “in collective moral damages that should be directed to a fund to promote racial equity and against the LGBTTTIQ community”.

Several human rights groups have filed suit, including the National LGBTI+ Alliance of Brazil.

Hamilton condemned the “archaic mentality” and the Mercedes driver acknowledged that he was “Surrounded by that kind of attitude and been white all his life”. He is the only black driver in F1 and received honorary Brazilian citizenship last year.

Piquet, who won three F1 titles in the 1980s, made the comment referring to an incident between Hamilton and Red Bull driver Max Verstappen at the 2021 British Grand Prix. Piquet’s daughter is Verstappen’s partner.

Piquet apologized in a statement for “his poor judgment” in using a racist term, but he is “one widely used colloquially in Brazilian Portuguese as a synonym for ‘boy’ or ‘person’ and was never meant to offend”.

In his decision, Judge Pedro Matos de Arruda said that “subtlety is one of the characteristics of the current racism in Brazil” and that this word “is not an affectionate nickname”.

Piquet used racist and homophobic language in another interview when referring to Hamilton’s failure to win the championship.

In his commentary, Piquet implied that if Hamilton hadn’t been gay, “he would have won the championship… So being gay would be a negative trait,” the judge added in his ruling. Piquet will be able to appeal the sentence.