Mercedes Benz Media
Formula 1 made an error on a post on their official Instagram channel, and it didn’t go unnoticed by Piastri or Leclerc.
F1 driver's Instagrams
F1 drivers have huge Instagram followings. Lewis is undoubtedly the king of the F1 driver ‘gram with over 38 million followers, more than 20 million more than the next driver.
Some drivers with big followings actually have more followers than the team that they drive for, like Lewis, Charles, Max, Fernando, Gasly, Bottas and Colapinto.
Here’s how many IG followers each current Formula 1 driver has, in order:
- Lewis Hamilton – 38.1m
- Charles Leclerc – 17.1m
- Max Verstappen – 13.2m
- Carlos Sainz – 10.7m
- Lando Norris – 9.2m
- Sergio Perez – 7.4m
- Fernando Alonso – 7.2m
- George Russell – 6.1m
- Pierre Gasly – 5.3m
- Valtteri Bottas – 4.6m
- Franco Colapinto – 4.2m
- Oscar Piastri – 3m
- Alex Albon – 3m
- Esteban Ocon – 2.4m
- Yuki Tsunoda – 2.4m
- Nico Hulkenberg – 2m
- Kevin Magnussen – 1.5m
- Lance Stroll – 1.4m
- Zhou Guanyu – 1.4m
- Liam Lawson – 819k
Lewis really is the IG king. He’s the only driver to have more followers than the official Formula 1 page itself, which has 31.8 million fans.
The other standout on the list above is the Williams driver Franco Colapinto. Despite only having entered F1 late in the 2024 season, the Argentine has already attracted a huge fanbase with 4.2 million followers. He’s the only South-America driver on the grid so has an entire contintent supporting him.
Piastri vs Leclerc battle at Qatar
There were a number of good on-track battles from the Qatar Grand Prix. But one of the standout tussles was the action between Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri after the safety car restart on lap 40.
Leclerc was 3rd and Piastri was 4th. Piastri got a great tow off the Ferrari down the main straight and drew alongside Leclerc, on his outside, in to Turn 1. For the next four corners the two drivers were pretty much side-by-side, Piastri having done the undercut on Leclerc numerous times.
Barely a millimetre separated the two, but they never made contact. Leclerc held the position but we loved the racing.
F1's Instagram Blunder
A couple of days after the Qatar GP finished, Formula 1 released their ‘Top 10 onboards’ video on YouTube, highlighting the best driver’s eye footage from the weekend.
The battle between Leclerc and Piastri featured in the video. It was a standout moment from the weekend, so the Formula 1 social media team decided to use a clip of it on their Instagram, promoting the newly released YouTube video.
However, they made a mistake when writing the caption for the video. Can you spot it below?
Yep. They misspelled Oscar’s surname. They missed the ‘S’ from Piastri and instead made him Oscar Piatri.
Oscar was evidently browsing Instagram in the days after the race, watching back some footage from his sweet on-track duel with Leclerc. And the eagle-eyed McLaren driven spotted the typo straight away. So he commented on the post.
Piastri comments ‘Leclerc and who?’, pointing out that the F1’s admin might want to check their spelling in the caption. That comment has received over 40,000 likes.
Not long after Oscar commented, Charles weighed in the comments as well. He replied to Oscar with “And Piatri !”, trolling him by suggesting that F1 got it right and now Oscar shall be known as Oscar Piatri.
Screenshot credit outremer_empire
It didn’t take long, however, for the F1 admin to notice the error of their ways and correct the spelling error in the caption, so now Piastri has the ‘S’ back in his name.
And now it seems like Leclerc has deleted his reply as well. Shame, I was hoping Piatri would stick.
