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Nicolas Latifi recalls the “very positive” message he unknowingly received from Lewis Hamilton during last season’s title decider.
It wasn’t one of those messages that the Canadian driver’s PR team would delete or even report as soon as he deleted the social media app from his phone because of his unconvincing response to his involvement in the Abu Dhabi incident.
It was Latifi’s crash in a race with Mick Schumacher that sparked the safety car period that gave Max Verstappen back his world drivers’ title hopes from Hamilton – and the Dutchman made the most of the opportunity .
This Williams The driver was seen as a villain by many fans, who clearly felt his crash was entirely his own fault, changing the course of an exciting title race – and he even received death threats.
But Hamilton had zero toxicity to him, instead, he Contact Latifi He himself was quitting social media at the time – the seven-time former world champion said a few months later that his fellow driver had his “full support”.
“It’s a very positive thing,” the Montreal-based 27-year-old told the Beyond the Grid podcast, coming to the end of his third and final season with Williams already eliminated from the team in 2023.
“Lewis did send me a message to contact me. He’s kind of out of touch with the whole social media world, and himself.
“He obviously has his own emotions to deal with, what he’s struggling with. But he did send me a really good message, totally supportive.
“I even got messages from some of the other top Mercedes team members, as well as countless visible messages from different team accounts, different drivers, etc.”
Despite knowing he wasn’t intentionally influencing the 2021 champion’s fortunes, Latifi found the backlash difficult to deal with — he had to delete himself from social media last December.
“Maybe two days later, I did remove social media from my phone, and then I slowly went back to it and reinstalled the app on my phone,” said Latifi, who has only been at the Japanese Grand Prix this season. Score.
“I obviously have PR people helping me with my social media and all that and they have access to it. They said they were trying to clean it up as much as possible, like anyone would do in that situation.
“So I’ve obviously heard a lot from them, obviously from family members who are still on social media, and then I noticed how bad it was.
“When I go back to social media, I still see all the online hate abuse and all that. And I think that’s clearly not possible. It’s just the ugly side of social media today.”
“It doesn’t matter, especially since I didn’t actually do anything wrong. If I crashed on purpose, that’s another story. But I’m just doing my game.”
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