Christian Horner has claimed Red Bull are “appalled” by Nelson Piquet’s comments about Lewis Hamilton days after their own race row. Horner said he was “fully behind” Lewis Hamilton after the incident and said the team were fully against discrimination.
It comes days after Red Bull junior Juri Vips was suspended from the team after making his own racist comment. The Red Bull boss was speaking to Sky Sports F1 after he was asked why Red Bull did not put out a statement like other teams condemning Piquet’s comments,
Horner replied: “First of all we are appalled at Nelson’s comments, this is from an interview from some time ago, but we obviously had an incidence with one of our young drivers at the end of last week. And we took very definitive action where he made a racist comment so we took action and immediately removed him from the team.
“So we had put out a statement about Juri and then this one comes out and we felt we’d made a very strong statement through action of actually dripping Juri from the team, from not in any way condoning any form of racism and discrimination.”
He added: “Of course, we are fully behind Lewis, we are fully signed up to the Hamilton Commission and we felt actions sometimes talk louder than words. And the action we took with Juri, which obviously was draconian but in line with the policy we have.”
