Sebastian Vettel has been accused of “greenwashing” by Formulation E driver Lucas di Grassi just after the Aston Martin driver criticised the sequence in an job interview.

When Vettel has generally voiced his fears in excess of local climate improve he has lengthy been sceptical of the all-electric powered racing sequence, expressing in advance of its start “I never like it at all” and “I consider it is not the long term.”

Vettel, who will retire from Formulation one at the close of the calendar year, informed German weekly newspaper Zeit this 7 days why he is not intrigued in doing work with Formulation E.

“I never want to be a mascot and I never want to set my deal with ahead for some thing that does not totally encourage me,” he claimed.

“I never fully grasp the that means guiding [Formula E]. The battery technological know-how that is currently being made has almost nothing to do with the technological know-how that a standard automobile could use.

“It is not fantastic for the atmosphere if the batteries are billed not with renewable power but with fossil fuels.”

Di Grassi, the 2016-seventeen Formulation E winner and only driver to have contested all one hundred of the series’ races, criticised Vettel in a sequence of social media posts.

“If Vettel never want to appear to Formulation E, it is his selection,” he claimed. “Although it is the 2nd maximum compensated sequence solitary seater in the environment, nonetheless much absent from a leading F1 income.

“Now to say that the technological know-how of the cars and trucks are significantly less pertinent to the long term of cars, he possibly has no strategy of what he is chatting about or is attempting to mislead the common community on goal.”

Vettel has develop into ever more outspoken on environmental issues in latest a long time. He has started utilizing a bicycle rather of a automobile to commute to races and organised write-up-race garbage collections to thoroughly clean up circuits.

“All that eco-friendly things he has been undertaking these days – amassing trash, driving bicycles etcetera – is absolutely greenwashing, not what he actually thinks,” ongoing Di Grassi, who raced a solitary year of F1 for Virgin in 2010. “So, [whether] he likes or not the sequence, he really should be supportive of it. That is all.”

2022 Dutch Grand Prix

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