Verstappen Speaks Up for Chris Lulham After Portimão Penalty Sparks Online Abuse

Max Verstappen has condemned the online abuse aimed at his Verstappen Racing team-mate Chris Lulham after Saturday’s GT World Challenge race at Portimão, where a penalty to the #3 car ended its chances of victory. The four-time world champion used social media to call out the messages aimed at the British driver, saying he felt he needed “to speak up”. It was a short intervention. Coming from the most-followed driver of his generation, it carries a weight that a statement from a team or a series rarely does.

A penalty in Portimão and a target in the replies

The race itself should have been the story. The #3 car was in contention until the penalty arrived, and Verstappen responded with a strong recovery drive that clawed back much of what had been lost. Victory, though, was gone. In a championship where the margins are tight and the field is deep, a single sanction can decide the result.

What followed is a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched motorsport online over the past five years. Once the result was settled, a section of the audience went looking for someone to blame. Lulham, a capable professional but a far less famous name than the man he races alongside, became the obvious target. The stewards’ ruling was a matter for the stewards. The reaction to it was something else: personal and hostile, and aimed at a driver whose public profile offers little protection against the volume a Verstappen-sized audience can generate.

That asymmetry matters. A world champion can absorb criticism because he has a vast following, a team and an F1 career that defines his public image regardless of what happens in a GT race. A driver building his reputation in sports-car racing has none of that cushioning. When thousands of strangers decide he is the reason their hero did not win, the effect is out of all proportion to anything that happened on track.

Why Verstappen’s voice lands differently

Condemnations of online abuse in motorsport usually come from institutions: a team statement, a series announcement, a governing-body campaign. They are necessary but easy to ignore, because the people sending the abuse do not see themselves as answerable to a press office.

Verstappen’s intervention works through a different mechanism. Much of the abuse directed at Lulham will have come from people who regard themselves as Verstappen supporters, acting, in their own minds, on his behalf. Online pile-ons are partly about belonging: the sender is performing loyalty to a community and seeking its approval. When the figure at the centre of that community says plainly that he does not want it, the performance loses its point. Abusers can dismiss a series or a governing body as “the establishment”. It is much harder for them to dismiss the person they claim to be defending.

There are limits. Anonymous accounts are not reformed by a social media post. Platform algorithms still reward outrage, and some of the people involved will either not see his message or not care. Speaking up does not stop abuse. What it does is change the norm within a fanbase. Fewer people join the next pile-on, those who do find themselves more isolated, and the target knows that the most powerful voice in the conversation is on his side. For Lulham, that last point may matter most.

It also fits the way Verstappen has built his racing life outside Formula 1. His GT programme, run under his own banner, is a personal project rather than a commercial obligation, and it depends on the drivers he brings into it. Letting a team-mate be scapegoated without comment would have damaged something he has invested in heavily. Defending Lulham is the right thing to do, and it also protects that project.

Abu Dhabi 2021 and the abuse F1 keeps seeing

Formula 1 has seen this before, and Verstappen has been close to it more than once.

The clearest precedent is Nicholas Latifi after the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. His late crash brought out the safety car that set up the final-lap decider between Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, and Latifi received death threats for his trouble. He wrote openly about the experience afterwards. His case set the pattern that has repeated since: the least powerful driver connected to a high-stakes moment takes the worst of the abuse, whether or not he did anything wrong.

The same season showed that no side of a rivalry is immune. After Verstappen and Hamilton collided at Silverstone in July 2021, with Verstappen taken to hospital for checks, Hamilton was subjected to racist abuse online, drawing condemnation from Formula 1, the FIA and Mercedes. Verstappen’s followers and Hamilton’s spent that year trading hostility that went far beyond anything the two drivers said about each other.

Since then, the sport’s institutions have put more into the problem, the FIA’s United Against Online Abuse campaign among them. The Portimão episode shows both the value and the ceiling of that work. Campaigns create a framework and a vocabulary. They do not reach into a specific fanbase at a specific moment the way a direct word from the star at its centre can. The most effective responses to these incidents have tended to come from drivers themselves, refusing to let their names be used as cover.

Singapore form and the road to Austin

None of this has distracted Verstappen from his day job. A week before Portimão he won the Singapore Grand Prix from pole, beating Charles Leclerc and Andrea Kimi Antonelli for his second win of the season. Those 25 points took him to 221, fourth in the drivers’ championship.

The context for that result is sobering for Red Bull. Antonelli leads on 340 points with eight wins, 102 clear of his Mercedes team-mate George Russell. Verstappen is 119 behind with six rounds left. Even six consecutive Grand Prix wins would bring him 150 points, and that would require Antonelli to collapse in a way nothing this season suggests he will. The title is effectively a Mercedes matter. Red Bull’s realistic targets are smaller. Their 332 points leave them fourth in the constructors’ standings, seven behind McLaren, and Verstappen is eight points behind Lewis Hamilton for third in the drivers’ table.

Driver	Team	Points	Gap to leader
Andrea Kimi Antonelli	Mercedes	340	–
George Russell	Mercedes	238	102
Lewis Hamilton	Ferrari	229	111
Max Verstappen	Red Bull	221	119
Charles Leclerc	Ferrari	215	125

That position frees Verstappen in some ways. Without a title fight consuming every week, he has room for his GT commitments and, it seems, for the kind of public statement that a driver locked in a tense championship battle might hesitate to make. Singapore also showed that he can still beat everyone in the right conditions. The United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas on 25 October is the next chance to prove it. Red Bull need points there to overhaul McLaren, and Isack Hadjar’s recovery from 22nd on the grid to 10th in Singapore suggests the second car can contribute.

The harder version of the same test

Verstappen deserves credit for speaking quickly and plainly. But defending a team-mate in your own GT squad is the easy version of this test. Lulham is on his side of the garage, sharing his project and his interests. The harder version will come when the target of his followers’ anger is a rival.

That has happened before and will happen again. A collision in Austin, a contested move in Mexico City, or a stewarding decision that costs Red Bull their hopes of third place could put a McLaren, Ferrari or Mercedes driver in the line of fire. The real measure of Verstappen’s intervention this week is whether he says the same thing then, to the same audience, with the same directness. If he does, Portimão will be remembered as the moment the sport’s biggest fanbase was told clearly what its figurehead will not tolerate. If he does not, it will look like loyalty to a friend rather than a principle. On his record of consistency, he should be expected to pass the harder test too, and it may come sooner than he would like.