You have to admire Bernie Ecclestone – even if he is a man of monstrous imperfections

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This was published 7 years ago

You have to admire Bernie Ecclestone – even if he is a man of monstrous imperfections

By Darren Kane

You're not supposed to end up a billionaire several times over if you escape the cloisters of high school years before you should, to become a junior potato baron or the purveyor of second-hand car parts, sourced from origins never properly disclosed.

And your odds of achieving financial immortality are rendered exponentially more infinitesimal if you're a man standing 160 centimetres and blind in one eye. Being possessed of an undeniable penchant for a hairstyle suggestive that you shouldn't have been allowed to abscond from the dank depths of the Cavern Club back in 1962 is also likely to be of no help.

Controversial figure: Bernie Ecclestone is a difficult man to like, but he orchestrated the total transformation of Formula One.

Controversial figure: Bernie Ecclestone is a difficult man to like, but he orchestrated the total transformation of Formula One.Credit: Getty Images

Had Bernie Ecclestone been born in 1980, not five decades earlier, he'd have had no chance of any career in Formula One. Ecclestone never went to Cambridge, nor anywhere near a high school awards ceremony. Yet his reign running F1 outlasted eight presidents of the US and the same number of prime ministers of his native Britain. Such was his total control, it was once said that in F1 the sun didn't rise in the east unless the now 86-year-old czar permitted it free passage over the horizon.

As the ringmaster of F1 from the 1970s until this week – the now controlling shareholder Liberty Media has dethroned Ecclestone, and instead bestowed on him the magnificent but fatuous title of F1's chairman emeritus – Ecclestone orchestrated the absolute, maddening transformation of the sport. From a disorganised collective of predominantly amateur (and amateurish) teams, it became a global behemoth, valued north of $10 billion.

For almost five decades, Ecclestone was not merely the CEO of the sport in the modern sense; for most of that period, he effectively owned the whole show. The born grafter, who escaped school to do just that. The son of a fisherman, who spent his formative years living under the flightpath of Germany's Luftwaffe bombers, which targeted London in the Second World War, playing with unexploded munitions.

In the mid 1970s the ownership and exploitation of the commercial rights to Formula 1 – broadcast rights, deciding which countries were granted races each year, sponsorship and signage – was a debacle. Countries sold their TV rights for a pittance, or squandered them for nothing. Teams were so broke race organisers never knew exactly which ones would turn up from event to event.

In the decade to 1975, 10 or more drivers lost their lives in F1 cars. Grand prix drivers were conditioned to not wear seat belts, as they only hindered the escape from a wreckage which became a fireball. In 1970, the F1 driver Jochen Rindt died in a high-speed accident on the Curva Parabolica during the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. Later that year, he became the only posthumous F1 world champion. Rindt's manager was Bernie Ecclestone. Rindt's death affected Ecclestone immensely.

Ecclestone, together with motorsport's world governing body, worked feverishly in the 1970s and through the next decade to make the sport safer in terms of track and car design. Ecclestone mandated for at-track mobile hospitals and medical professionals, headed by the British neurosurgeon Professor Sid Watkins.

Ecclestone commercialised the sport on a scale entirely unfathomable at the time he first assumed control, though to be fair he did so squarely on a two-for-you-one-for-Bernie split. Ecclestone made many people rich beyond their wildest dreams, but only through looking after himself. However, it's often conveniently forgotten that Ecclestone only did this after he – as a team owner of Brabham – offered all participating F1 teams an equal share of the revenue and risk. Every team, including Ferrari, refused.

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But Ecclestone is a difficult person to like or conclude as being all that nice – he strikes me as brutally honest, with no filter. I interviewed Ecclestone three years ago – the first thing he said, after exchanging pleasantries, is that he considered Russia's President Vladimir Putin his role model, because "he's strong enough to not take a lot of nonsense from people". Ecclestone's previously expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler traverses every threshold of abhorrence.

Ecclestone's enlightened views on women in sport and society are no more palatable, once suggesting that women "should all be dressed in white, like all the other domestic appliances". For reasons never adequately explained, Ecclestone once said that what he'd ideally like in a female F1 driver was for her to be a "black girl with super looks, preferably Jewish or Muslim, who speaks Spanish". Without question, Ecclestone revelled in the controversy, once musing that "if there aren't fires left I make them, so I can put them out".

At the time I interviewed Ecclestone in 2014, he was due the next month to face a criminal trial in Germany, over an alleged €33 million bribe he had paid, in connection with the sale of part of F1's interests. Later that year, under the ominous spectre of prison time and without a lick of irony, Ecclestone actually bought his way out of the trouble he was charged with buying his way into, paying €76 million to Bavaria's state coffers (a very small percentage of which went to a children's hospital).

As ugly as that was, Ecclestone wasn't thieving from the sport. He has never played the part of the parasitic Sepp Blatter and his cronies, tongues lapping water from the river of gold. Nor did Ecclestone force young and impressionable racers, standing on the precipice of success and staring into the abyss, to dope or throw races (though Ecclestone did once propose "fake rain" to make races more thrilling).

What's Ecclestone's legacy? Answers to such questions can be so binary. Of the 500-odd comments this week below a BBC report of Ecclestone's removal, public sentiment runs 10-to-one in favour of wrath at the "poison dwarf", over adulation. Really, though, such matters are decidedly less black and white.

Ecclestone is a ruthless tycoon who lived by the creed of don't threaten, just do; much more than he ever was a just a sports administrator. Ecclestone wasn't so much the governor of the sport, as he was the sole harvester of its fruits until he began divesting his direct ownership in the late 1990s. Hypothetically, F1 could've ended up where it is today anyway, even in the absence of Ecclestone's involvement. But F1's worth $10 billion now because of Ecclestone's stewardship, not in spite of it. It was Ecclestone who shouldered the risk.

In almost every sense, Ecclestone is an anachronism – a man from another time; a man perfect for the 1970s, but not now. Sport won't ever see another of his kind. Corporate sport is about stakeholder management, governance and KPIs – not BS banging heads together, and just getting things done.

Ecclestone is a man of monstrous imperfections; yet, just maybe, he's the greatest sporting administrator that there's ever been. For that, you have to admire him, even if you don't like him.

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