Lando Norris’s race in Baku ended at Turn 1 on lap 36. Franco Colapinto locked up on cold tyres at the Safety Car restart and slid into his own teammate, Pierre Gasly, who was pushed across into the McLaren. None of the three cars went any further. Afterwards Norris said Colapinto should be banned. Colapinto took the blame the same day. It should have ended there, but it didn’t.

By the next day, the most recent picture on Norris’s Instagram, a post from 17 September with nothing to do with Baku, had gone from under 3,000 comments to nearly 70,000. ESPN reported that much of the abuse aimed at Norris came from accounts backing Colapinto, but the flood reached Colapinto too, and his own posts filled up in the same way. Not all of it was hate. Mixed in with the abuse on both drivers’ pages were hearts, a lot of them, left by people trying to bury it.

Colapinto had spent the build-up to Baku asking for calm, as he has before. “They have to give respect, and that’s what we all want,” he said at Imola last year, asking for it on behalf of every driver on the grid. On Sunday Alpine put out a statement, its second of the season, saying the hate had been aimed at its own driver as well as at rivals and members of the media. The team was careful to add that condemning it was “not aimed at any one fan base or the supporters of one team or driver.”

You are allowed to think Norris was wrong. Max Verstappen came to Colapinto’s defence, and plenty of fans agree with him. That is the sport working the way it should: drivers disagreeing in the pen, fans arguing about it in the grandstands and online, a penalty that half the crowd thinks is too soft and the other half thinks is too harsh. None of it needs anyone to send a single abusive message.

It has been like this all year, and it has run in every direction. In March, after a collision with Colapinto in China, Esteban Ocon took full responsibility and went looking for him in the media pen to apologise. He received death threats anyway, and Colapinto’s own management stepped in to ask for it to stop. Two weeks later at Suzuka, Oliver Bearman hit the barrier at 50G avoiding Colapinto’s much slower car. The FIA put it down to the closing speeds of the new cars and took no action, and the abuse turned on Colapinto instead.

Norris has been here before, as the driver speaking up for someone else. In December 2021, Nicholas Latifi crashed his Williams with five laps to go in Abu Dhabi, and the Safety Car that followed decided the world championship. What came back at him was thousands of messages, some of them threats against his life, and they reached the people closest to him too. When he went into London for a day that winter, he took a bodyguard. In an open letter he said he knew a thick skin came with being an athlete, and that what shocked him was the extreme tone of the hate. But he was more worried about someone else. “It concerns me how somebody else might react if this same level of abuse was ever directed at them,” he wrote. Norris, asked about it at the time, said Latifi “deserves none of it in any way.”

While Latifi was abused over a crash, Lewis Hamilton has been abused for who he is. He is the first and only Black driver in Formula 1’s history, and for as long as he has raced in it, the racism has come at him in person as well as online. At a test in Barcelona in February 2008, a group of spectators blacked up their faces, put on wigs and shirts reading “Hamilton’s family”, and shouted racist abuse at him from the stands. Thirteen years later, hours after he won the 2021 British Grand Prix following his first-lap collision with Verstappen, racist messages appeared under his team’s posts. Formula 1, the FIA and Mercedes condemned them together. Red Bull, whose driver had spent that afternoon in hospital, put out its own statement: “While we may be fierce rivals ontrack, we are all united against racism.”

The next summer a recording surfaced of Nelson Piquet, a three-time world champion, using a racial slur about Hamilton while talking about that crash. A Brazilian court later ordered Piquet to pay five million reais, directed to funds for racial equality and against discrimination of the LGBTQIA+ community. Hamilton’s reply was short.

Hamilton’s answer has been to change who gets into the sport. In 2020 he set up the Hamilton Commission with the Royal Academy of Engineering to find out why so few Black people work in motorsport. Its report the following July estimated that only one per cent of people working in Formula 1 came from Black backgrounds, and found racist comments inside the industry being waved away as banter. That same month he put £20 million of his own money into Mission 44, a foundation that backs young people from under-represented backgrounds into education and careers, and set up Ignite with Mercedes to do the same inside motorsport. By its second year, Mission 44 was supporting 33 organisations, including its first in Brazil and the United States. It is patient work, measured in years.

The abuse runs on a different clock. It arrives in seconds, and it does not stop at the driver. Norris talked about that in 2022, when it had started reaching his then girlfriend, who had never watched a race before she met him. “I want to protect her,” he said, and admitted that he reported what he could, but there was simply too much of it to get through.

It is not only motorsport. When England lost the Euro 2020 final on penalties, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, who was 19, were racially abused online through the night. Rashford’s reply came the next day.

Elsewhere the abuse has found a new engine in betting, and the messages arrive the moment a result goes the wrong way for someone’s stake. After a third-round loss at the 2021 US Open, Sloane Stephens, a former champion there, said she had received more than 2,000 messages of abuse, among them racist slurs and threats of violence. Her post began: “I am human.” After a first-round loss in New York in 2024, Caroline Garcia shared messages telling her to end her life and others threatening her family.

In basketball, Alyssa Thomas of the Connecticut Sun said after the 2024 WNBA playoffs that in 11 years in the league she had never been called the things she was called on social media that season. “We come to play basketball for our job, and it’s fun,” she said, and asked for something to be done about the rest of it. The WNBA said it would involve law enforcement where it had to. In the NBA, J.B. Bickerstaff, then coaching Cleveland, said gamblers had found his phone number and were sending him messages “about where I live and my kids.”

Graham Gano is 38 and has kicked in the NFL for 17 seasons. Last November he said that ever since sports betting arrived, he gets messages every week telling him to end his life, because a kick he made or missed cost someone money. He said it while a herniated disc was keeping him off the field, and added that after this long, he was used to it. “I just want to play ball,” he said. In baseball, Lance McCullers received threats against his children after a bad start in 2025, and Houston police traced them to a drunk bettor overseas. This month the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS and their players’ unions wrote to gambling regulators in 35 states and Washington, D.C., asking for anyone who threatens an athlete or their family to be banned from sportsbooks for life. Last week the NBA and WNBA followed with a letter of their own.

In Japan, what it can cost is now written into law. Hana Kimura was a 22-year-old professional wrestler who became a fan favourite on the reality series Terrace House, and in 2020, after months of abuse online, she died by suicide. Two men who had sent her messages were each fined 9,000 yen, less than a hundred US dollars. Her mother, Kyoko, a former wrestler herself, spent the next two years campaigning, and in 2022 Japan made online insults punishable by up to a year in prison. “I want people to know that cyberbullying is a crime,” she said the day it passed.

Formula 1 has tried. It launched Drive It Out in 2022 with every driver on the grid in the video, and one line from it has stuck: “If you cannot be respectful then don’t be part of our sport.” The FIA built United Against Online Abuse after a race steward was abused online the same year.

None of it works unless the people in the grandstands and the comment sections decide it matters. We cover this sport from both sides of the fence, the stands and the paddock, because we love it from both. The rivalries are part of that love, and so are the arguments: a strategy call you think is wrong, a stewards’ decision that makes you furious, a crash that ends your driver’s race.

Racist abuse is not part of it. Death threats are not part of it. Piling onto a driver’s page because they said something about your driver is not part of it either, and it does nothing for the driver you think you are defending. If you see it, report it and block it. If it is coming from people who wear the same colours as you, say so.

Some fans are already doing something about it. The hearts that were there from the start have kept coming under Norris’s posts and Colapinto’s, row after row of them, pushing the abuse further down the page. They are answering one flood with another.

On Sunday, Norris and Colapinto will line up on the grid at Sepang, a 26-year-old and a 23-year-old who have spent most of their lives chasing this. Both have had things said about them this week that nobody should have to read. And by the end of the night there will be new comments, maybe with new names on the receiving end, but if this weekend is anything to go by, the hearts will get there first. Finally.