The greater the risk, the more he revels in the challenge. Adam Sweeting profiles Formula One’s ambitious mastermind, Bernie Ecclestone
Such is Bernie Ecclestone’s reputation as the shadowy mastermind behind Formula One, that it is tempting to think he personally orchestrated the chaos of the season’s opening event in Melbourne.
“You couldn’t have wished for a better start,” declares the diminutive entrepreneur, reflecting on a race that gave Eddie Irvine his belated first Grand Prix win while leaving the main championship contenders empty-handed.
Add a whiff of controversy generated by British American Racing and their gimmicky double livery, all drawing further attention to the sport’s notoriety as the last refuge of the tobacco conglomerates, and you have the perfect crowd-pulling cocktail of sport, politics and skulduggery.
Ecclestone is happy to allow the myth of his personal omnipotence to grow by confirming or denying nothing, though in reality the Formula One teams would have got rid of him years ago if they hadn’t been happy with the way he was guiding the sport.
Through a combination of vision, boldness and ruthlessness, he has built Formula One into a powerful global industry and earned himself a personal fortune estimated at 1,5-billion by the Sunday Times.
But behind the smoked glass of his Knightsbridge headquarters, the 68-year-old Ecclestone broods over the future of his businesses and laments the way that the buccaneering entrepreneur is being squeezed out by risk-averse lawyers and boardroom committees.
“In business, I’ve got big balls,” he claims. “I’ll put up the $100-million or whatever it takes to get a project off the ground. Then, when I’ve made a success of it, other people look at it and they say, `I could have done that.’ But of course they didn’t do it. They didn’t have the balls to take the risk.”
Ecclestone’s recent 1,2-billion Eurobond issue has prompted speculation that he’s raising cash in order to take his digital pay-per-view TV operation into other sports, particularly European Super League football and a new tennis world championship involving Boris Becker and his former manager, Ion Tiriac.
Ecclestone doesn’t believe all the client broadcasters of his Formula One coverage have been marketing the service aggressively enough, so he would love to squeeze added value from it. After all, he has invested 60-million in it.
Ecclestone freely admits he has been in discussions with Milan-based Media Partners about televising football. “My involvement would be a set-up thing rather than day-to- day management, but I don’t know what the extent of my investment would be.” And, he adds: “I’m actively talking to people involved with tennis and I think it will happen with or without me. There are too many tournaments and there should be just one world championship.”
People who know Ecclestone agree that his handshake is the law, but urge extreme caution when negotiating with him.
“Life is a deal as far as Bernie’s concerned, and the degree of success that he attributes to things is in relation to whether or not it’s profitable,” says Jackie Oliver, who recently sold his remaining interest in the Arrows team he founded 22 years ago.
So many deals, so little time. Apart from masterminding Grand Prix racing and planning possible expansion of his pay-per-view TV service, he is preparing a second attempt to float his Formula One Holdings company on the stock market.
Ecclestone manages to chisel a gap in his schedule to rewind some personal history over fish and chips at his local pub. He was born in St Peter’s in Suffolk in 1930, where his father was a trawler skipper. A few years before the United States Air Force invaded windswept East Anglia with its B17s, the Ecclestones moved to Kent, where Bernie’s father started a new career as an engineer.
“I started racing pushbikes there, then I raced motorbikes when I was 14 or 15. I’ve been racing something all my bloody life. None of this happened until we’d moved from Suffolk when I was eight. We moved up to Dartford, then to Bexley.”
He can’t remember the first deal he ever made. “I’ve done a few thousand deals in my life. I’ve always tried to keep myself completely independent where I never had to ask anybody for anything, so if I wanted anything I would work to make enough money to buy it.”
He gained a BSc in chemical engineering at Woolwich Polytechnic and took a job in a laboratory. Bored rigid, he quit to go into a partnership selling motorcycles and cars, and quickly built up several successful garage businesses.
In the late Fifties, he bought the remnants of the struggling Connaught Formula One team, but the adventure was terminated when driver Stuart Lewis-Evans suffered a fatal accident at Casablanca.
“It was a tragedy,” Ecclestone reflects. “I sat with him in the hospital and he had 70- degree burns. He was sitting there with a blanket round him waiting to be seen by some doctors. Had that been today, we’d have had him in a private plane and he’d have been in a proper hospital within a couple of hours. I’ve always pushed and pushed for safety in Formula One. We can’t stop accidents; you just have to make sure that when they happen, the guys are looked after.”
Ecclestone quit motor racing for a decade and diversified into property and finance. Meanwhile, he became one of the country’s most prominent motor dealers. Max Mosley, president of the FIA, Formula One’s governing body, and an Ecclestone ally for 30 years, remembers how “he didn’t just buy and sell individual cars, he’d have swap- ups. You might swap your three cars for his four plus an amount of money, so it got complicated. It was always said that he could walk into a showroom full of cars and value it in seconds. It was like being the fastest gun in the West, and car dealers would come from all over the country to have a deal-up with Bernie to see if they could put one over him.”
But the howl of the starting grid could not be denied and, at the end of the Sixties, Ecclestone re-emerged as the manager of Austrian driver Jochen Rindt.
Rindt captured the Formula One championship – posthumously – in 1970. The following year, Ecclestone paid 100,000 for the Brabham team, which he ran until 1987, overseeing Nelson Piquet’s drivers’ championship victories in 1981 and 1983.
The other businesses were soon sold off. Ecclestone began to focus on the wider Formula One picture. With assistance from Mosley, he hammered a ramshackle bunch of individualists into a coherent association of teams who grudgingly accepted that concerted action was preferable to eking out a precarious living on borrowed money (usually Ecclestone’s).
Previously, teams had not even been required to turn up at all the races. Under Ecclestone’s brisk new regime, if a team signed up with the Formula One Constructors’ Association they were obliged to enter their cars for every Grand Prix. Thus Ecclestone was able to offer race organisers a guaranteed package of racing teams, which gave him formidable financial leverage. He knew television was going to transform Formula One, because it was the key to the sport’s sponsors reaching the maximum number of people.
“I made a contract with the European Broadcasting Union where they got their members to broadcast all the races,” he explains. “It was a monumental step forward; before that, if they wanted a particular race, Monaco for example, they’d broadcast it if it suited them, or they might only show half the race.”
Mosley was struck by Ecclestone’s foresight. “It’s particularly rare in motorsport, where the whole psychology of the racing driver is the next event. In the old days, that was probably because the next event could be the last, when it was really dangerous and we killed people all the time.
“Bernie has always seen what could come and what could be. He sees things differently from most people, like all great entrepreneurs.”
As the sport’s value rose, Ecclestone negotiated increasingly lucrative deals with individual broadcasters, like the 70- million contract he signed with ITV in 1996. His position at the core of Formula One’s development was cemented when the FIA offered him the post of vice-president responsible for commercial affairs. Mosley’s election as FIA president in 1991 meant that he and Ecclestone now control the administrative and commercial interests of Formula One.
Ecclestone has built Grand Prix into the most sophisticated and best-run sport on earth, capable of greatly influencing the economies of host countries, but his achievements as a media visionary are often overlooked.
Some say Ecclestone and Mosley run Formula One as a private monopoly. “Nonsense,” grunts Ecclestone. “I look after the commercial side, and I benefit from it and the teams benefit from it. The teams, along with the FIA, sort out the sporting and technical regulations, so the idea of it being a dictatorship is nonsense.’
If Ecclestone can’t make the Formula One teams do things, he can at least apply persuasive pressure. “When you see business opportunities, you try to make them happen if you can,” he reasons. “I can’t tell Ferrari to take Schumacher, but maybe there’s some way we can get the two sides together. Imagine McLaren being so bloody supreme and then hiring Michael. The championship would look a bit sad.”
Ecclestone’s dislike of publicity and his clandestine business practices have fuelled an image of him as a sinister manipulator. His notorious 1-million donation to New Labour was portrayed as a bribe to guarantee the continuation of tobacco advertising in Formula One.
“I always thought Bernie was something of a Eurosceptic,” says former Tory chancellor Kenneth Clarke, a Formula One fan and a friend of Ecclestone. “I haven’t had a chance to ask him what on earth he thought he was doing supporting New Labour. I think he was rather hurt by the affair, because he was portrayed as having tried to do something fairly crooked, when I suspect it was naivety.”
Ecclestone has made blustering noises about moving Formula One to the Far East to escape the European ban on tobacco advertising due in 2006, but he knows it won’t happen. The sport’s infrastructure is solidly embedded in Europe, particularly Britain. Moreover, the influential Mosley accepts that the scales have tilted.
“I think F1 could do without tobacco sponsorship, and I think it probably will sooner rather than later,” says Mosley. “There are a lot of big sponsors who would be more inclined to come into F1 if there weren’t tobacco. I think the idea that F1 will be much worse off without tobacco is nonsense.”
Although he has presided over Formula One’s evolution from spanners and sawdust to computational fluid dynamics, Ecclestone carps at the FIA’s determination to curb Grand Prix cars’ speeds. He even hints that today’s drivers are pampered and overpaid. “The drivers of 30 years ago would laugh at the safety consciousness today. They got in their bloody cars and raced, with ditches and telegraph poles at the side of the road. The drivers didn’t think long term; they just worried about who they were going to climb into bed with if they survived the race.
“In fact, the more dangerous it was the better they liked it, because the guys that were a bit chicken backed off and the guys with the big balls got on with the job.”
Many have perished in the process. They can rest assured that Ecclestone is still burning the candle for them.
ENDS