The Spanish branch of New York-based advertising agency, TWBA, which is part of Omnicom has now pulled the site after hundreds of abusive messages about Hamilton were posted.
Andy Burnham, the culture, media and sport secretary, led calls for action against the abuse which included comments such as “half breed” and the N-word.
A spokesman in the New York office said it did not know why the site, designed and owned by its interactive marketing branch in Spain, had not been monitored to stop racists using it to abuse Hamilton.
Among comments on the site was someone calling himself Carillo, telling Hamilton: “Kill yourself in your car.” A message from Alberto says: “I hope you run over your dad in the first pitstop, Hamilton.”
“This is not what we condone as a company,” said TBWA spokesman Jeremy Miller; it would take “appropriate action” once it identified who was responsible for the website.
Yesterday Hamilton’s father, Anthony, spoke for the first time about how he had attempted to deflect the worst of the bad feeling away from Lewis and revealed that the extent of ill-will was so bad that his 16-year-old son, Nicholas, who suffers from cerebral palsy, had also been handed a black cat as he entered their hotel. “I thought that was extremely unprofessional,” said Hamilton senior. “But do you know what they fail to realise? We’ve a black cat at home and she has been extremely positive for us.
“My family has taken a lot of stick this past week, not just this week, but the past few months,” he said. “I did think that maybe this isn’t the place for my family because as a parent you make sure you do right for your family and kids.
“But I never said anything to Lewis. I kept it to myself, even though I was going home thinking, ‘I didn’t think the world was quite like this’. And then you think ‘It’s just the way it is’, and I’d send Lewis a text saying ‘whatever happens, people love you’. The negative people are a small percentage, and even the negative ones have a heart.”
Fernando Alonso has blasted a ‘voodoo-style’ Spanish website whose visitors were encouraged to make racist slurs against Lewis Hamilton and place imaginary nails in the world championship leader’s path around a simulated version of the Interlagos circuit, insisting that ‘in 2008 we cannot have these kind of people in our world’.
“If it’s true, obviously this is not [acceptable],” said the 27-year-old former double world champion. “In 2008 we cannot have these kind of people in our world.”
“Really it’s not for us to take action against these people,” underlined McLaren team principal Ron Dennis. “In some instances it’s government and in some instances it’s organisations that are designed specifically to address these issues in this world.”
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