Formula 1 spends a lot of time selling itself as a global community. On Tuesday, July 7, the FIA tried to give that idea some teeth, marking the first annual United Against Online Abuse Day with a coordinated message from across the paddock: enough.
The United Against Online Abuse (UAOA) campaign isn’t new — Mohammed Ben Sulayem launched it back in 2023 — but this was the first time it’s been packaged as a fixed date on the FIA’s calendar. The timing, dropping right after the British Grand Prix weekend at Silverstone, felt deliberate: get the whole grid in one place, put the sport’s biggest microphones behind it, and make sure the point lands beyond the usual bubble.
UAOA was born out of a pretty familiar modern motorsport story: an FIA steward targeted with abuse and harassment online after the 2022 United States Grand Prix. The FIA’s response was to frame the problem as bigger than F1 and to chase a cross-sport, cross-sector coalition rather than treating it like an unfortunate by-product of passionate fandom. That coalition has now grown to more than 70 members, according to the FIA, and the project has also received co-funding from the European Union.
The message for this first annual day was blunt — “online abuse has no place in sport” — and at Silverstone the full grid and Ben Sulayem lent their faces to it.
“Online abuse undermines our competitions and endangers our athletes, officials, and fans,” Ben Sulayem said. “It erodes the very spirit of sport. But together, we can change that.”
If that sounds like governing-body language, the drivers brought it back to something simpler: rivalry doesn’t have to mean dehumanising the people on the other end of the screen.
Fernando Alonso, never one to dress things up, put it in terms even the most tribal fanbase can’t really argue with. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in a different team or you support different colours, all of them deserve respect,” he said. “Together, we can make the sport and the world a better place. We need to work all together on this.”
What tends to get lost in the conversation is how wide the blast radius is. Drivers are the obvious targets because they’re the public avatars for everything that goes right or wrong on a Sunday. But the abuse doesn’t stop at the helmet: team staff, officials and broadcasters all catch it, often for doing nothing more than their jobs in front of an audience primed to assume bad faith.
Sky F1 presenter Natalie Pinkham used the day to push a more practical idea — that the most effective pushback isn’t always grand statements, but ordinary people deciding not to let the worst behaviour slide.
“Be disruptive in this space,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to call stuff out, like if it doesn’t feel right when you read it, call it out.”
That’s the awkward truth for the sport: regulation and platform policies matter, but culture changes when the majority stops excusing the minority. F1 has spent a decade growing its online footprint and courting new audiences; it now has to deal with what happens when that reach is weaponised.
McLaren CEO Zak Brown argued the same point from a different angle — drown out the bile by refusing to share it, engage with it or reward it with oxygen.
“I think a great way for the fans and the community to get involved is to stand up for it as well,” Brown said. “The more positive news we get, the more that will bury those that are spreading hate.”
The FIA’s pitch for UAOA is that it can become more than a slogan: it’s set up to conduct research that can shape education and policy development, with the goal of reducing the volume of abuse and helping younger users understand the consequences of what they’re normalising. It’s an intentionally broad remit, and in a sport that loves measurable outcomes, it also raises the obvious question: what does success actually look like?
That’s where this initiative will live or die. A single day on the calendar is easy. Sustained pressure — on platforms, on moderation standards, on the way public figures talk about officials after contentious weekends, and on fan communities that slip into mob instincts — is the hard part.
Still, F1 is one of the few sports with the reach to make this a genuine collective effort. When every driver is saying the same thing, at the same time, it carries a different weight. The next step is making sure it isn’t just something the paddock “marks” once a year, then moves on from when the next flashpoint hits.
Because it will. And when it does, the sport will be judged less on its statements and more on whether it’s built the habits — and the backbone — to actually change what happens next.
