Vettel: Zero tolerance life time ban for abusive idiots

The sport condemned the behaviour at the Red Bull Ring, where most of the crowd was supporting Red Bull's world champion Max Verstappen and campsites are full of the Dutch driver's 'Orange Army' supporters.

Mercedes' seven-times F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton, F1's only Black driver, said he was 'disgusted and disappointed'.

"Whoever these people are, they should be ashamed of themselves and they should be banned from racing events for their lives," Aston Martin driver Vettel told reporters. "I think there should be zero tolerance."

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff, an Austrian, echoed Vettel's sentiments that the abuse had to stop and the culprits dealt with but the crowd should not be condemned as a whole.

He said real fans of whatever team or driver could not be racist, sexist or homophobic because otherwise "you don't fit F1 and we don't want you.

"On the other side, just because there's a few drunk, dumb-asses out there that haven't comprehended how the world goes today, we shouldn't condemn the 99.9% of the fans that come here.

The Mercedes team boss added when asked whether F1 had become more 'tribal' he ventured: "The sport polarises and triggers emotions.

"We want that... A few amoebas, people with one (brain) cell, let's not make it a general thing. We just need to target these guys and pick them out."

Mercedes said they invited one Czech fan, who wrote on social media how she was harassed by drunken male spectators who lifted her dress and said she deserved no respect as a Hamilton supporter, to watch the race in their garage.

Verstappen, whose popularity has already usurped that witnessed at the height of the iconic Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher era, has called for alcohol consumption at F1 races.

Some 60,000 spectators travelled from Holland to support world champion Verstappen. One of the reported incidents included a female attendee saying five Dutch supporters lifted her dress up and said: “no [Lewis] Hamilton fan deserves respect”.

A large contingent of Verstappen’s Orange Army are expected at the Hungarian Grand Prix in Budapest later this month, while organisers of the Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort on September 4 are anticipating a race crowd in excess of 100,000.

“One thing that can be improved is the security around places to keep people more in check,” said world champion Verstappen, who leads Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc in the standings by 38 points.

“And of course it is not an excuse, but they watch the race, go back, party, have fun, and drink alcohol.

“These things can be regulated. There is a certain amount of alcohol a person should have until it is time to go to bed and wake up sober the next morning because if you start to go crazy, you can do stupid things," added the first Dutch F1 World Champion.