FIA president makes television plea to drivers with bizarre ‘we’re not rappers’ remark
Mohammed Ben Sulayem’s comments have once again attracted mixed attention.
FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has called out F1 drivers for the amount of swearing that takes place during races on the team radio, insisting that ‘we’re not rappers’.
Under the current system, the official F1 global broadcast has access to all 20 team radios during the race and chooses to broadcast snippets of audio from drivers and race engineers from key exchanges to add to the narrative of the race.
Ben Sulayem, however, is unhappy with the language used by some of the drivers during the heat of a battle. “I mean, we have to differentiate between our sport – motorsport – and rap music,” he told Motorsport.com. “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].”
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He went on to add: “I know, I was a driver. In the heat of the moment, when you think you are upset because another driver came to you and pushed you…When I used to drive in the dus, I would get upset.
“But also, we have to be careful with our conduct. We need to be responsible people. And now with the technology, everything is going live and everything is going to be recorded. At the end of the day, we have to study that to see: do we minimise what is being said publicly?
