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Ferrari Formula 1 driver Carlos Sainz says the 2021 title fight between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen is being hurt by “a lot of polarisation” between the two drivers’ respective supporters.
The contest between Hamilton and Verstappen has grown increasingly bitter as the season wore on, their relationship clearly dented by big collisions at Silverstone and Monza and the most recent race in Saudi Arabia, which was absolutely chock full of controversial moments between the pair.
And this has seemingly been echoed among the fans of the championship, with both Hamilton and Verstappen having dedicated fandoms.
Moreover, this was a season in which racist abuse was sent to Hamilton on social media and had to be condemned by both Mercedes and Red Bull among others after the Silverstone clash.
“After the race [in Saudi] I went back to my hotel and watched the race because I wanted to see what everyone was talking about,” Sainz said ahead of the winner-takes-all title decider in Abu Dhabi.
“I watched it and you realise how tight this battle is, how every race you have a fight between the two championship contenders and how exciting that is and how ideal it is for Formula 1.
“Unfortunately, on social media, there is a lot of polarisation, a lot of… I wouldn’t say abuse between fans, but very polarised.
“It makes the fight a bit less exciting when you see the two sides fighting each other so much. It would be better if they were more neutral, enjoy the fight and let the best man win.”
Sainz, who was Verstappen’s team-mate for a season and a bit at Toro Rosso during the start of their respective F1 careers, admitted he was reluctant to say who he thought the best driver was this year.
“Because if I say one, the other side will criticise me and say ‘Lewis? No, Lewis has had a better car’.
“If I say Max, the other side will say the same…
“It’s too polarised. I don’t want to make a stance,” he added.
“They’ve both done incredible seasons. They’ve both done an incredible level. From my side, I just hope they can keep it clean this weekend, give us a good showdown for the image of the sport more than anything else, for the benefit of Formula 1, that we are still a sport, not just a show – and show good sportsmanship in the grand finale.”
The Race Says
Valentin Khorounzhiy
The amount of arguments and partisan comments generated by the Hamilton/Verstappen 2021 title contest is arguably prime evidence of F1’s upward curve.
It is simply a natural byproduct of a ‘can’t miss’ storyline generating tons of engagement and serving up new situations to discuss virtually on a weekly basis. For a series that was quite worried just a few years ago, with reason, about maintaining the public’s attention, keeping existing fans engaged and getting new fans to buy in, it’s more or less vindication.
Now that we’re done with the glass-half-full bit – yeah, this polarisation just sucks. It makes the whole thing not very enjoyable and dissuades from any discussion of the goings-on at the front of F1 this year.
Don’t take this as an attack on the very concept of fandom. Sports thrive thanks to fandom. From the Olympics to the US college sports, they benefit from either your various shortcuts to fandom – shared nationality, shared location, shared community, whatever – to just our simple propensity for picking favourites. And that’s good. Nobody wants to go to a stadium filled with ‘neutral observers’.
But in the social media age, it’s been very easy to see the mechanics of how someone can turn their fandom into something of a twisted art form, with true mastery in performing mental gymnastics in which you only bring up and acknowledge things that paint your team or your hero in a good light and dismiss things that don’t – or those that make the hated rival look good.
If you go searching through so-called ‘football Twitter’, you will find absolutely endless, suffocating examples of this. And in 2021 it looks to have contaminated F1 circles, too.
It’s only a game, of course, so it doesn’t really matter that much, except we spend so much time thinking about it and consuming it that it really kind of does. And the partisanship sours it.
In this particular example, whichever side of the title battle you prefer, you should be able to concede the overwhelming probability that neither Hamilton nor Verstappen are alone to blame for all the unsavoury on-track stuff that we’ve witnessed. But I’m not convinced the polarisation Sainz speaks of allows for such a concession.
Is it partly down to how the two teams’ leaders have conducted themselves, with the barbs and the quips and the insinuations of rule-breaking, and the right-of-reviews? I guess. Certainly, lines have been crossed – but this isn’t the only cause, and it’s a lot more forgivable for Mercedes and Red Bull to not get along than for their fans. There is more at stake for them than for any of us – I think that’s one of the axioms we all accept for sports to have any meaning and be worth watching.
The Race – both our various writers and the platform as a whole – has received its fair share of accusations of bias this season, whether it be bias against Hamilton or against Verstappen. It is important to note though that the accusations of ‘British bias’ seem to have been the most common refrain. It makes surface-level sense – this is a British-based outlet that writes in English, so if you view sports through a prism of nationality then it’s a no-brainer.
From my experiences within the newsroom and perception of the content, those suggestions are completely baseless. Sometimes they are impressively baseless, too – even I’ve been accused of Brit bias, and my connection with the UK pretty much begins and ends with having lived there a while ago for just over a year, supporting a UK-based football team, knowing the language and quite liking Edgar Wright movies.
But none of that should matter. This is not the Netherlands versus the UK, the UK versus the rest of the world, the Netherlands versus the rest of the world, whatever… this is Max Verstappen versus Lewis Hamilton, Red Bull versus Mercedes.
It has been a mostly-exquisite show that may well have saved the best for last. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t support, or have opinions – but clashing on ‘online battlefields’ will not get the script rewritten or change the outcome.
So care, and watch, and root, and discuss – but make sure to approach it in such a way that you and everyone else can still look back at the 2021 season reasonably fondly, whoever comes out on top.
