Leading Formula One drivers at this week’s Singapore Grand Prix said Thursday they would not tone down their language on team radio, after the governing body FIA warned they should cut out the swearing.
FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem told Autosport.com in an interview that he had asked Formula One Management to minimise the amount of foul language being broadcast on television.
Ben Sulayem said that motorsport was not “rap music” and drivers should mind their language, especially as children might be watching.
But world champion Max Verstappen, who is no stranger to a fruity outburst, told reporters that if the FIA did not like what drivers say in the heat of a race, then the solution is to simply not broadcast it.
“What are we? Five-year-olds? Six-year-olds?” the Red Bull driver said.
“Even if a five-year-old or six-year-old is watching, they will eventually swear anyway when they grow up.”
Swearing on F1 team radio is already bleeped out before being broadcast on a delayed feed, but Ben Sulayem wants to cut down on the amount of censoring needed.
“We have to differentiate between our sport — motorsport -– and rap music,” Ben Sulayem said.
“We’re not rappers, you know. They say the F-word how many times per minute?”
“We’re not rappers, you know. They say the F-word how many times per minute? We are not on that. That’s them and we are us,” Ben Sulayem told the motorsport news website.
Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton said he had no problem with trying to clean up the language in Formula One.
“I’m sure if you say there are penalties for it, people will stop (swearing),” Hamilton told reporters in Singapore.
“I don’t know whether that is needed, but I definitely think there is a little bit too much.”
But Hamilton did not like Ben Sulayem’s comparison with rap music.
“I don’t like how he’s expressed it, saying ‘rappers’ is very stereotypical. And most rappers are black,” said Hamilton.
“That was the wrong choice of words. There’s a racial element there.”
Lando Norris agreed with Verstappen, adding that F1 “can just not play the radios.”
“We’re the guys in the heat of the moment… So it’s a lot easier for them to say than for us to do,” the McLaren driver said.
“We’re just putting our passion into it. You’re listening to the rawness of drivers and their thoughts and their feelings.
“When I listen to it, I find it cool and I find it exciting.”
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc said foul language happened in lots of other sports, but F1 was unique in that drivers had microphones attached to them.
“I think there are other priorities for the FIA at the moment,” Leclerc said.
“I would return the favour to the FIA and ask them to take off some of our bad words and not broadcast as much. And it’s quite easy to do.
“For us to control our words when you are driving a car at 300 kilometres per hour in between walls is tricky,” he added.
“And we are humans after all.”
