Nicholas Latifi received dire threats after he caused a safety car in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last season which gave Max Verstappen the chance to rejoin Lewis Hamilton and eventually take the world championship. Latifi looks back at Beyond the Grid Back on that period.
"Lewis did send me a message to reach out to me. He was kind of detaching from the whole world of social media and whatnot himself. He obviously had his own emotions to kind of deal with, what he was fighting with. But he did send me a very nice message, fully in support", Latifi told the podcast. However, the Canadian driver was heartened by more people. "I even had messages from some other top Mercedes team members that reached out, along with countless visible ones from different team accounts, different drivers and whatnot.”
Hate messages towards Latifi
The 27-year-old driver, who disappears from Formula 1 after this season because Williams did not offer him a new contract, was bothered by all the negativity surrounding his person. Many Hamilton fans, for instance, wished him death. Latifi got an awful lot thrown at him and it has not left him cold, he says.
“It was maybe two days when I did take social media off my phone and then I returned to it slowly, reinstalled the apps on my phone." What was especially frustrating for Latifi was the fact that he was completely wrongly accused of things. "In reality I did nothing wrong. If I had purposely crashed, that’s a different story. But I was just doing my own race.”