F1 Bahrain Grand Prix: Lewis Hamilton plays down his champagne spraying of grid girl at previous round

Lewis Hamilton said he didn’t know until arriving in Bahrain that there had been such a furore about him spraying a grid girl on the rostrum after winning last Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix. The Twittersphere went into overdrive when, in the traditional way after the presentation of the trophies, Hamilton grabbed his bottle of bubbly and for a fleeting moment turned it on grid girl Liu Siying.

The pictures that followed appeared to show the 22-year-old Shanghai Institute of Visual Art graduate grimacing as the champagne hit the side of her head. And that drew condemnation from Object, a campaign group against sexism, which condemned Hamilton’s behaviour as “selfish and inconsiderate”, and called on him to apologise.

But the graduate said she had not been bothered by the incident and did not see it in any way as sexist.

“It lasted for only one or two seconds, and I didn’t think too much about it,” she told the Shanghai Daily. “Some foreign media are more sensitive about the topic than local media. I was just told by my employer to stand on the podium, that’s what I did.”

As for Hamilton, he said ahead of this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix: “I hadn’t really heard too much about it until today.

“My actions are through excitement. This is Formula One, it’s the pinnacle of motorsport, I’d just won a grand prix for the team… I usually see it as a fun thing. I would never intend to disrespect someone or try to embarrass someone like that. I don’t really know the reasons why people are starting to bring those kind of things up but this is a sport that so many people love and the more we show character and fun, perhaps it reflects just how great this sport is. That’s what I try to do. It hasn’t really affected me. It’s nice to know that the lady wrote in. If it had been the other way and she’d wrote in and she was really unhappy, then perhaps there would be more concern.”

Spraying champagne in victory was either started by the Swiss driver Jo Siffert at Le Mans in 1964, by accident, after he celebrated winning his class, or by the American legend Dan Gurney, victorious with A J Foyt for Ford there in 1967. It’s said the American was handed a magnum of champagne that had been shaken, and which exploded over Henry Ford II, as Gurney opened it.

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On other matters, Hamilton said there were no bad feelings after team-mate Nico Rosberg’s angry outburst after the Chinese race, in which the disgruntled German accused him of “driving too slowly” while trying to preserve his tyres. Hamilton didn’t appear remotely bothered about that, and said the matter had been spoken about at the time.

“I don’t particularly see any reason to go back to it. Some spun those words any way they wanted to spin them, but we are reunited as a team this weekend and we move forwards. There’ll be times when people are unhappy about something, but we’re grown-ups and we’ll move past it. But in any case, I was the fastest guy out there…”

Whether he will be again this weekend remains to be seen. The super-high track and ambient temperatures, and the effect they can have on rear tyre wear in particular, could offer Ferrari a further opportunity to challenge, and perhaps to repeat Sebastian Vettel’s surprise victory in Malaysia.

“We have to assume Ferrari will be very strong again, but from our experience in Malaysia we will be taking a slightly different approach and I hope that helps to combat our problem in that area,” Hamilton said. “I’m confident the team can rectify that issue, but Ferrari have been very, very competitive in the last couple of races and I anticipate that they will be very strong.”