F1 News

Ricciardo highly critical of F1 team's social media: "Idiots"

8 April 2021 at 20:15
Last update 8 April 2021 at 21:56
  • GPblog.com

Of course, Formula 1 has a team dedicated to social media. Besides actual updates during Grands Prix they also share interesting, remarkable, crazy and funny moments. Fine of course, but sometimes the team goes a bit too far. An example of this is the use of images as a result of the horror-crash Grosjean had.

Dramatization of sport

Ricciardo talks about all sorts of things in an interview with Square Mile and he also talks about the use of content. Netflix, for example, has a knack of turning the sport into a reality TV show. Ricciardo and Sainz were presented as direct competitors in the second season, while that wasn't really the case. It's a bit of creative freedom, but Ricciardo points out that one has to be careful to keep the authenticity.

A good example he gives afterwards is a top ten of moments from last season that were shared by Formula 1 on social media. These moments consisted for a large part of crashes and that is a questionable point. After all, the sport is much more than that and it should not become a kind of 'crash porn'.

Idiots!

Ricciardo: "I think last year, F1 put on their social channels, like, ‘top 10 moments of the year’ or something, and eight of the ten were crashes. I was just like, you guys are f*cking idiots. Maybe 12-year-old kids want to see that kind of content, and that’s cool because they don’t know any better, but we’re not kids. Just do better, guys. Do better than that."

And that's not the first time Ricciardo has spoken out about this, showing Grosjean's crash. He was also bothered by the endless repetition of the images at the time during the race weekend. Sebastian Vettel agreed with Ricciardo that it is not necessary to show the same images over and over again. Certainly not when it comes to a situation where someone's life was in danger.