Alex Albon has denied claims Lewis Hamilton spent as much as £140,000 on dinner ahead of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix for Sebastian Vettel’s send-off meal. All 20 drivers were photographed enjoying a dinner ahead of Vettel’s last weekend as an F1 driver.
Hours later, a receipt went viral on social media suggesting the drivers had spent £138,000 on the meal. The receipt has since been confirmed as a fake but Williams driver Albon set the record straight on the F1 Nation Podcast.
He added: “We’re normal people. We’re not here expecting caviar on our plate and gold spoons and if it’s not gold I’m not eating it. We had a set menu. There’s a lot of people with dietary requirements, like obviously Lewis is vegan and all that kind of thing.
“Lewis covered the bill, very nice of him. He organized it as well. Very nice of him. So he knows what the bill was. So that bill, I saw that bill, that bill was from the Salt Bae guy, we didn’t even eat there. We ate in a place called Hakkasan which was a Chinese place.”
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The fake receipt was shared on Twitter the same night the drivers were pictured at the table. It quickly received thousands of retweets with over 88,000 users now having liked the picture
The image showed the 615065AED was spent at the Nusr Et restaurant in Abu Dhabi on Thursday evening. However, it was later confirmed as untrue in a string of tweets over the weekend.
Poster @Alda001 said: “For legal reason my lawyer has asked me to clarify that this is a joke lol. Salt Bae posted this receipt from his Abu Dhabi restaurant on his ig [Instagram] literally minutes ago, I don’t even know what restaurant the F1 drivers are at.”
He later added: “Brundle just mentioned my joke fake receipt tweet. I left my best s***houssary for the last race of the season.”
