Nelson Piquet has been unsuccessful in his bid to overturn a fine for racist and homophobic comments made against Lewis Hamilton. In March, the three-time Formula 1 World Champion was ordered to pay five million Brazilian Reals ($953,000) by a court after charges were brought by four human rights groups, including Brazil's National LGBT+ Alliance. Piquet's comments came from interviews from 2016 and 2022 where he discussed Hamilton's championship battles with Nico Rosberg and Max Verstappen respectively. Piquet, who is the father of Max Verstappen's girlfriend Kelly Piquet, had apologised for his comments and described them as "ill-thought-out", and has always maintained that he had no racist motivation for using his comments in the interviews. In his statement at the time, the 70-year-old also claimed that the racist term is widely used in Brazilian-Portuguese to mean "guy" or "person". According to Globo in Brazil, Piquet's recent attempt to appeal the fine has been unsuccessful, and the same financial penalty stands. Speaking after Piquet's apology in June last year, Hamilton responded: "I'm incredibly grateful to all those that have been supportive within the sport, particularly the drivers. "I've been on the receiving end of racism and criticism and that negativity and archaic narratives for a long, long time, and undertones of discrimination, so there's nothing really particularly new for me."
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