It is not uncommon for a chat with Bernie Ecclestone to end with the questioner feeling he knows less than he did before the conversation began.
That was certainly the sensation this week, after a telephone call in which the most controversial entrepreneur in sport discussed the deal that resulted in the sale by him and a German bank of 75% of formula one to a Luxembourg-based investment company last week for a sum reported to be about £600-million.
The whole business is one of fathomless, not to say tiresome, complexity. Nevertheless, the idea that you can buy or sell an entire sport remains an extraordinary one, and it seemed right to ask Ecclestone about the transfer to CVC Capital Partners of the shares owned by Bambino Holdings, his offshore family trust, and in particular about the nature of the trust’s stake in the new company, Alpha Prema, which will run the sport with Ecclestone remaining as chief executive.
”I don’t know how they’ve arranged that,” he said, as if he were discussing a matter of supreme unimportance. ”The trustees did it. I don’t know anything about it.”
A lack of transparency is one of the chief charges laid against Ecclestone’s long stewardship of formula one. The top-secret Concorde agreement, which outlines the rules of participation and the division of the spoils, is at the heart of the dissatisfaction and, when the present agreement expires, at the end of 2007, five of the major manufacturers currently involved in formula one are intending to start their own breakaway series. Ecclestone believes last week’s news will help persuade them to change their minds and avoid a potentially catastrophic split.
”Stability,” he said. ”That’s what the manufacturers want. This new company has been on the scene for a while. They’re not people who buy shares just so that they can sell them again. They’re stayers.”
It seems possible other elements of CVC’s portfolio will come in useful. When it emerged that formula one had passed into the hands of a company whose other acquisitions in recent years have included the Automobile Association (AA), Kwik-Fit and Halfords, all sorts of interesting possibilities began to suggest themselves. The sport’s most intractable problem in recent years has been the boring nature of the racing. The technical regulations, already vastly complicated, have been rewritten time and again with the intention of livening things up. The arrival of the new owners, however, could make things much simpler.
What formula one needs, in fact, is not stability but unpredictability, not transparency but chaos. And CVC could be just the people to provide it, as long as the suits in Luxembourg employ the philosophy of vertical integration in order to use all their resources to the best advantage.
So, next season’s grands prix could feature the on-track use of a motorists’ rescue service, with AA vans setting out to help drivers stranded on the track by such common irritations as a flat battery or a broken fan belt. Instead of relying on their own crews of engineers and mechanics for mid-race adjustments in the pit lane, the likes of Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen could be forced to queue for the services of a gang of fitters recruited from the nearest branch of Kwik-Fit.
And the experience gained as the owner of Halfords could be used to accessorise the cars with fuzzy dice, go-faster stripes and a device warning of the proximity of the speed cameras introduced by Ecclestone’s pal Max Mosley as part of his campaign to slow the cars down.
Well, we can dream. Much more likely is another year of tedious political to-ing and fro-ing as CVC tries to justify its investment by persuading the manufacturers – BMW, Renault, Honda, Mercedes and Toyota – to abandon their secessionist plans. As usual in modern formula one, the biggest risks are being taken not on the track but in the boardroom. — Â