F1 legend Nelson Piquet fined £780,000 for racist and homophobic slurs at Lewis Hamilton by court in Brazil

NELSON PIQUET has been fined £780,000 for racist and homophobic comments made against Lewis Hamilton, a Brazilian court ruled on Friday.

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

AFPNelson Piquet has been ordered to pay £780,000 in damages for comments he made about Lewis Hamilton[/caption]

Piquet issues a grovelling apology to Hamilton after his comments surfacedGetty

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.

Piquet, 70, apologised to the British driver and said 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 Brazilial 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”.