Gasly's Reported 13,000 Death Threats Force F1 to Confront Its Online Abuse Problem

FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has claimed that Pierre Gasly received 13,000 death threats after the Spanish Grand Prix, a figure reported by RaceFans this week. The disclosure comes as the championship heads to Mexico City for round 19 on Sunday. It has already grown into a wider argument about who stokes these online pile-ons, with PlanetF1’s coverage drawing the broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson into the conversation.

A number that should stop the paddock

Start with the scale. A Formula 1 grid has 22 drivers. One of them, by the account of the sport’s governing body, was told thousands of times that someone wanted him dead after a single race weekend. Discount the total as heavily as you like for duplicate messages, automated accounts and the crudeness of any keyword count. What remains is still far beyond the normal hostility that follows a contentious moment on track.

The figure also needs context that only the FIA can supply. A number this large invites questions about how it was compiled, over what period and across which platforms. That is not a reason to doubt the underlying problem. It is a reason for the FIA to publish its method, because a statistic that can be picked apart is easy for sceptics to dismiss, and this one deserves to land.

The language around the story has been blunt. In PlanetF1’s report, the abuse was described as “a sickness” and “a plague”. That kind of rhetoric is understandable. It is also familiar. F1 has described online abuse in similar terms for years, and the gap between the words and the consequences for the people sending the messages has barely narrowed.

Gasly is no lightning rod, which makes it worse

The uncomfortable detail is how ordinary Gasly’s position is. He is not fighting for a title or locked in a feud that splits the fanbase down the middle. He sits 10th in the drivers’ championship on 42 points, carrying Alpine, who are sixth in the constructors’ standings with 69. Gasly has scored roughly three-fifths of his team’s total, against 27 for his team-mate Franco Colapinto. In Austin last Sunday he started 10th and finished 10th, collecting a single point. This is the profile of a solid midfield season, not of a driver who attracts obsessive attention.

That is the point. Online abuse in F1 attaches itself to moments, not to stature. Nicholas Latifi was a backmarker at Williams when his crash at Abu Dhabi in 2021 brought out the safety car that shaped the title-deciding final lap. He later spoke publicly about receiving death threats for something that was, at worst, a racing error in a car fighting at the back. The same year, Lewis Hamilton was subjected to racist abuse after his collision with Max Verstappen at Silverstone. In both cases the trigger was a single incident, and in both cases the volume of abuse dwarfed anything the incident itself could justify.

If a driver in Gasly’s position can be targeted at this scale, nobody on the grid is insulated. That includes Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who leads the championship on 365 points with nine wins and has 123 points in hand over his Mercedes team-mate George Russell. The most visible driver in the sport has already experienced what happens when a narrative takes hold.

Clarkson, Marko and the megaphone problem

Antonelli’s experience at the end of last season is the closest parallel to the question now being asked about Clarkson. After the 2025 Qatar Grand Prix, Red Bull adviser Helmut Marko suggested Antonelli had deliberately let Lando Norris past. The teenager was swamped with abuse, and Red Bull subsequently issued a statement expressing regret over the comments and acknowledging what Antonelli had been subjected to. Marko did not send a single threat. He did not need to. A senior figure with a platform had framed a young driver as acting in bad faith, and the rest followed.

That is the mechanism the sport now has to reckon with. A high-profile voice casts a driver as a villain rather than simply as someone who made a poor move. Social platforms reward the outrage with reach, and a small fraction of a very large audience turns criticism into menace. Each step is individually deniable. The cumulative effect is not.

Nothing reported suggests that Clarkson encouraged anyone to threaten Gasly. No serious person would argue that a commentator is legally or morally responsible for the words of strangers. Nor should the reaction to this story become an argument against sharp opinion. F1 is better for pundits who criticise drivers bluntly, and fans are entitled to be furious about a move they think was wrong.

There is still a real distinction between saying a driver made a reckless decision and implying that he is a bad person who deserves what is coming. People with large followings, inside and outside the paddock, increasingly know which side of that line produces engagement. The responsibility that comes with that reach has nothing to do with censorship. It is the basic awareness that framing travels further than nuance, and that the people at the far end of the chain are rarely the reasonable ones.

Why F1’s defences keep falling short

None of this is new to the FIA. Its Drive It Out campaign, launched under Ben Sulayem’s presidency, was designed to highlight and tackle abuse aimed at drivers, officials and volunteers. Ben Sulayem has spoken before about the hostility directed at stewards and race officials. The intent is genuine, and naming the scale of what Gasly faced is a useful act in itself.

The limits are structural. The FIA does not run the platforms where the abuse happens. Teams respond with solidarity posts, drivers are told to step away from their phones, and moderation by the social media companies remains inconsistent. Awareness campaigns change the tone of official statements, but they do little to alter the calculation of an anonymous account holder who faces no consequences.

Football offers a more demanding model. Leagues and clubs have worked with police to identify senders, pursue prosecutions and, in some jurisdictions, secure banning orders against people convicted of online abuse. The value of that approach lies less in the number of cases than in the message that threats have an owner and an address. In most of the countries on the F1 calendar, threatening to kill someone is a criminal offence. The sport has rarely acted as though that were true.

Three changes would give the FIA’s words more weight:

• Publish the evidence. Explain how figures such as the 13,000 are gathered, so they become a benchmark rather than a headline.
• Pursue the identifiable. Fund a shared legal and reporting unit, alongside the teams and Formula One Management, that refers credible threats to the relevant authorities and reports outcomes publicly.
• Name the trigger moments. When a specific incident or comment drives a spike in abuse, say so promptly, before the narrative hardens.

The run-in will test whether anything has changed

The calendar makes this urgent. Five rounds remain, starting in Mexico City this weekend. Antonelli’s lead means the title could be settled within weeks, but the battle behind him is fierce. Russell, Hamilton, Verstappen and Charles Leclerc are separated by nine points in the fight for second, and Red Bull and McLaren are level on 355 points for third in the constructors’ standings. The closing races of a season are when tempers run highest, and when a single collision or stewards’ decision can become a referendum on a driver’s character. The abuse after Abu Dhabi in 2021 showed how quickly that happens.

Ben Sulayem has given the sport a number it cannot easily ignore. The test is whether, by the time the season ends, the FIA can point to referrals made, senders identified and a published method behind its figures, rather than another campaign slogan. If it cannot, the next driver to be targeted will hear the same condemnation Gasly has, and it will mean just as little to the people sending the threats.