We have a great word in Dutch: “wappie”. (And no, that doesn’t have anything to do with the Cardi B song). “Wappie” refers to someone who is delusional, detached from reality, and completely absorbed into their own warped view of what the world is. It came to prominence during COVID when you had those wild conspiracy theories about 5G and more nonsense like that, but has since also been used for other cases that have nothing to do with the pandemic. This week, we got another beautiful case of wappie behavior at the hands of some Lewis Hamilton fans.
If you value your own sanity, you probably don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter. But if you do, then you may have come across the #TeamLH subset of Lewis Hamilton fans. They are certified wappies. They believe Hamilton can do nothing wrong and everything bad that happens to him is the cause of everything else in the world and also racism. Their most recent school trip away from reality is a theory that Mercedes is now actively sabotaging Hamilton because he is leaving for Ferrari next year. In their mind, that’s the reason why Hamilton is underperforming compared to Russell this year.
You won’t have to search long to find examples of this. Just go to the replies on any tweet from Mercedes, Hamilton or Russell. Or you can go to the team’s Instagram page and look there for about three seconds. Or you can open any post on the dedicated Reddit page to Lewis Hamilton.
And now some of them have kicked it up a notch. Over the weekend, Mercedes - along with the other teams and all the journalists on the FIA approved list - received an anonymous email about this perceived sabotage. I haven’t seen the email myself, so I don’t know the exact wording in it, but team principal Toto Wolff revealed that there were references to death in it and that it was worrying enough that he has called upon police to investigate it.
This has to end
Let’s be absolutely clear on something: I’m not saying that this is something that all of Hamilton’s fans do. Clearly, he has plenty of rational, normal fans who just root for a driver they like and get on with their lives when things aren’t going great. Just like how not every English football fan is a hooligan and not every sports fan in Philadelphia feels the urge to punch a police horse. And hell, Hamilton’s fans - and I’m using that word generously here - aren’t even the only ones in the F1 landscape that do this sort of thing. The Tifosi can be absolutely ruthless, there have apparently been some Mexican fans that have a very intense view of all things Checo, and the Brazilian fans have a habit of going haywire in any post relating to their drivers. I have personally been on the receiving end of, let’s say, some “sternly worded criticism” from Verstappen fans when I dared to do anything other than praise him as the second coming of the Lord Himself.
But the TeamLH people are a step above the rest. They have relentlessly harassed Nicholas Latifi after his crash in Abu Dhabi 2021. They sent death threats to Red Bull chief strategist Hannah Schmitz for constantly designing a better strategy than Mercedes. Michael Masi couldn’t post anything anywhere without getting an avalanche of insults and threats slung at him. Verstappen, Alonso, Vettel, Leclerc, Tsunoda, all of them have received hatred and harassment from this group of people for their perceived crimes against Hamilton. And now they have fully turned on Mercedes and Russell, with what looks like death threats against the team. It is time to stop.
Some examples of the toxic behavior, taken from the social media pages of Russell and Mercedes over the past week.
A monster of their own making
Obviously, the largest amount of blame falls onto these lunatics that have spun this insane conspiracy in the first place, and especially the ones who feel the need to be assholes about it. But it would also be dishonest to say that this came out of nowhere.
For his entire F1 career, Hamilton has built the image that everyone and everything was against him and he made it to the top of the sport against all odds. And not without reason: Hamilton faced an absolutely disgusting amount of racism during his career. Once he got to Mercedes, he and the team and Toto Wolff have spent every year constructing the tale that their car actually was a worthless piece of junk and they were in no state to win anything, only to then dominate the field. They always liked putting themselves in the underdog role and make it seem like their victory wasn’t a foregone conclusion because of a dominant car, but rather a titanic battle against everything that was trying to push them down. Obviously that had an effect on their fanbase as well, who took that idea and ran with it. The popular mantra “still we rise” actually came about during the dominant Mercedes era, despite the fact that there was very little to rise against. All that creates a breeding ground for outward aggression and hatred for anyone seen as “the enemy”.
And then of course came Abu Dhabi 2021. Hamilton and Mercedes spent months fanning the flames of controversy after that race, boycotting the prize giving gala and constantly bringing it up during the 2022 season. And after Latifi received so much hatred he deleted his social media, it took way too long for Hamilton and Toto to condemn it. They were all too happy with the “passion” of their fans when it was directed outward.
This horrorshow of a fanbase is a monster that Hamilton and Mercedes have helped create. And now they are experiencing firsthand what kind of harm this group can do. Thankfully, Hamilton himself has already called upon these people to stop that bullshit and treat Russell and the team with the respect they deserve. Let’s hope it has an effect and this will finally bring about an end to such toxic behavior within the F1 fandom.