Red Bull Racing has parted ways with an employee over his general racist remarks, not related to F1 happenings, after it surfaced on social media.
Messages from an employee working at Red Bull base in Milton Keynes surfaced on social media few days back and within days, the F1 team confirmed to Sky Sports that the person has been fired from his work, for the racist texts shared among his friends.
It is unclear how the messages were leaked to the person who called out Red Bull on the same platform. It was not related to any of the F1 happenings, especially the situation at Silverstone, but dated much before to April, May, June and early July.
In fact, the messages were more related to football and other general matter, with the use of ‘N’ word common. The news comes around the time when Red Bull has been prompted by many F1 fans to encourage racist messages for Lewis Hamilton.
The British GP incident led Christian Horner and Helmut Marko, showing displeasure at how Hamilton caused a clash with Max Verstappen. Red Bull along with Horner released a statement talking against racism, with Verstappen also swaying away from it.
Toto Wolff, however, indicated that the comments from their rivals may have contributed to the online storm. After the FIA hearing on Thursday, Mercedes released a strong worded statement against the Red Bull senior management trying to distort Hamilton’s image.
Meanwhile, the statement from the Milton Keynes-based team regarding the firing, stated: “We condemn racist abuse of any kind. We have a zero-tolerance approach to racist behaviour within our team. The person in question is no longer an employee of Red Bull Racing. We will not be commenting further at this stage.”
Here’s what Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton said in Hungary
Here’s what the FIA said and Mercedes’ statement
[Note: FormulaRapida.net has seen the messages which pushed for the firing, but do not wish to re-share on our platform]