Bernie Ecclestone Read online

  Senna’s death was seen as a serious body blow to Formula One. Because he was considered by many to be the greatest driver of all time – three years later a motor sports magazine’s all-time-greats poll would put him well ahead of Juan Fangio and Jim Clark – it was feared that fans worldwide who lionised his driving genius would turn away from the sport and cause television viewing figures to plummet. The marketeer supreme, Ecclestone knew that Formula One required a big name to keep the all-important television fans glued to their seats. But who could replace Senna’s moody, charismatic genius? There was Benetton’s rapidly rising young German star, 25-year-old Michael Schumacher, who that year would win the first of his five World Championships, and Damon Hill, 34, the Williams team’s number-one driver, who came second in the championship title race, but Ecclestone did not consider either of them at that time to be box-office.

  Instead, he came up with a name that immediately lit up the dollar sign in his head: Nigel Mansell, who, after winning the 1992 World Championship, had had a serious dispute with team boss Frank Williams which led to him quitting Formula One for the IndyCar Racing Championship in America. At the heart of the issue was the contractual terms being offered to 38-year-old Mansell for the following season. He was also concerned about the forthcoming arrival of three-times world champion Alain Prost and his displacement as the team’s number-one driver. Although Ecclestone publicly denied that he played any part in advising Williams – ‘I’m not in the business of telling people how to spend their money’5 – the team’s boss did, in fact, seek Ecclestone’s counsel on how best to handle the situation. Mansell was known as a tough negotiator who made all his own deals, and was judged to be at the peak of his driving form. The advice was short and sweet: ‘Stick to your terms but give him a deadline. If he doesn’t meet it, that’s it.’ Williams followed Ecclestone’s advice. As the deadline drew near, Mansell backed down. He was ready to accept Williams’s terms. But by now, with Ecclestone’s support, Williams was ready to play hardball. He offered Mansell less than half of what he had initially put on the table – a cut from £7 million to £3 million. Mansell packed his bags and headed for Indianapolis, while Prost went on to win his fourth championship title in 1993. Mansell enjoyed his own success in winning the IndyCar championship title.

  How much Ecclestone knew in advance of Williams’s negotiating tactic to reduce his offer by more than half is uncertain, but he certainly approved: ‘Nigel was offered a price and given a deadline by Williams. When the deadline passed, the price dropped. When you play poker, you ask yourself: “How strong is my hand? How much am I prepared to risk.” If you have a mediocre hand, you’d better be careful.’6 However, Ecclestone now found himself in something of a quandary: if he wanted to see Mansell take on Schumacher to the delight of fans and sponsors alike, he had to find a way to lure him back to Formula One, and resolve the problem of his contract with the Newman-Haas team.

  Within two weeks of Senna’s death, he was on the phone to Mansell in Indianapolis. At the same time, co-owner Carl Haas was sounded out to see whether he would sell Mansell’s contract for the rest of the season. The two men had done business before. In November 1986 Ecclestone had bought Formula One Race Car Engineering Ltd, a company set up less than two years earlier to run Team Haas, but which was forced to withdraw from Formula One when Ford decided, after one season, to terminate a three-year contract supplying the team with its Cosworth-developed V6 turbo engine. Ecclestone bought the company, sold some of its assets and re-leased the factory and offices.

  Haas was not pleased to hear from Ecclestone. He was preparing for the Indy 500 and wanted Mansell totally focused. At the same time, Mansell was privately dissatisfied with the way the Newman-Haas car had been performing that season and the call from Ecclestone inviting him back into Formula One was not altogether unwelcome. Ecclestone discussed his approach to Mansell with Frank Williams, who was not keen to have him back. Prost had retired at the end of the 1993 season and Williams favoured keeping Hill as his number-one driver, with the promising young Scot David Coulthard as number two.

  But Ecclestone continued to see Hill as a poor substitute for Mansell, beloved by Italy’s devoted tifosi as ‘Il Leone’ because of his gutsy and spirited determination, when it came to television billing. Mansell, he believed, was the obvious choice. So did Renault, who supplied the 3.5-litre turbo engine for the brilliant FW14B car in which Mansell had won the World Championship. With Ecclestone making the approach, and with Renault picking up a generous part of the bill, Williams agreed to a four-race deal worth £2 million. With the same subtlety, he also persuaded Haas to release Mansell, said to have agreed ‘a nominal sum’, according to Williams, for the French Grand Prix, the first of the four races, while still under contract. It proved a disappointing return. Schumacher and Hill came first and second, while Mansell was forced to retire in the forty-fifth lap with gearbox trouble.

  His second race at the European Grand Prix at Jerez also failed to live up to expectations, when he spun off the Spanish circuit during the forty-seventh lap. But if Mansell’s return had thus far done little to animate spectators and television audiences, his performances in the last two races of the season – in Japan and Australia – were considered to be the most exciting of the entire 1994 season. Hill won at Suzuka, with Schumacher and Mansell coming second and fourth. Mansell took the honours at Adelaide after Hill and Schumacher collided during the thirty-fifth lap. Ecclestone wanted to see Mansell’s contract with the team extended, but this time Williams refused to oblige. He wanted to stay with Hill and Coulthard.

  Undaunted, Ecclestone began trumpeting Mansell’s importance to Formula One on the sports pages, while, at the same time, persuading McLaren boss Ron Dennis to sign him for the season. McLaren agreed a $5-million contract, mostly funded by Marlboro, who were swayed by the publicity Mansell would attract. But it was to be the beginning of Mansell’s swansong. He missed the first two races of the 1995 season – in Brazil and Argentina – while the McLaren MP4-10 was modified to accommodate his size, before finishing tenth in the San Marino Grand Prix and retiring after 18 laps in the Spanish Grand Prix, complaining of the car’s poor handling. It brought to an end both his brief time with McLaren and his illustrious 15-year Formula One career. To Ecclestone, though, Mansell’s departure had by now become a matter of little interest. There was now emerging increasingly bitter rivalry between Schumacher and Hill for the World Championship title. It led to some breathless, if not, at times, irresponsible, clashes between the two drivers, as illustrated that season by their collision in the forty-fifth lap of the British Grand Prix, which would provoke a flow of bitter accusations from both parties. But it created what Ecclestone wanted – dramatic television to keep the spectators, the sponsors, and, above all, the television audiences happy.

  No one could doubt that he had worked relentlessly for 20 years to exploit Formula One’s enormous television potential. Whatever was good for television, which provided unequalled global brand exposure for eight months of the year, was good for Formula One. It was Ecclestone’s Brabham team that introduced the drama – and the dangers – of pit-stop refuelling at the Austrian Grand Prix at the Österreichring in 1982, which saw 13 crew members with a pressure hose blasting fuel into the tank at the half-distance point. It enabled cars to run faster with lighter fuel loads and softer tyres. Time lost in the pit would be quickly regained on the track. In addition to the drama of the human element, it also had the bonus of pleasing the sponsors: it gave their logos valuable television exposure. The following season other teams joined in. But then a near-disaster occurred at the Brazilian Grand Prix when fuel spilt from Keke Rosberg’s Williams car exploded into flames. It led the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA), the body which at that time controlled motor sport on behalf of the FIA, to ban pit-stop refuelling on safety grounds.

  But Ecclestone believed that the risk was well worth the television ‘entertainment’ value. By 1993, with his aut
hority within and without the FIA considerably increased in the intervening years, he was keen to see its reintroduction, all the more so to subdue mounting criticism that Formula One was becoming boringly predictable. The teams seemed to be split – at a meeting at Hockenheim they voted in favour, only to change their minds, apart from Ferrari, two months later at the Portuguese Grand Prix – but, predictably, Ecclestone, the prime mover, won the day, with Mosley’s support, to reintroduce pit-stop refuelling the following season.

  It was not long, though, before another serious incident occurred. During the fourteenth lap of the German Grand Prix, Dutchman Jos Verstappen pulled into the Benetton pit. Petrol spilt on to the hot engine caused the car to be instantly engulfed in a fireball. Verstappen was uninjured but seven crew members were taken to hospital with burns of varying severity. The incident created all the television ‘entertainment’ that Ecclestone could have wished for, as well as a fresh call by some teams for pit-stop refuelling to be once again banned. Ecclestone remained phlegmatically defiant: ‘The accident does not worry me any more than an accident happening on the circuit. We have not had any problems with it this season. It does not make me rethink refuelling. You saw how quickly the fire was put out.’7

  An inquiry into the incident established that a filter had been removed from its refuelling apparatus to increase the fuel flow rate by about 12.5 per cent to give a one-second saving in an eight-second pit stop. But Benetton team boss Flavio Briatore claimed it had nothing to do with the cause of the fire. An investigation by fire-safety experts commissioned by Benetton put the blame on a faulty part of the fuelling valve. Over the next two years there were a further two pit-stop fires – involving Jordan and Ligier and both caused by fuel spillage – until technical improvements to the refuelling apparatus, which pumped fuel into the tank at a rate of 3.3 gallons per second, eliminated the hazard. By now, though, pit-stop refuelling had become a regular feature welcomed by spectators, television broadcasters and sponsors. Ecclestone’s entrepreneurial instinct had been vindicated.

  He keenly supported another controversial innovation, proposed by Max Mosley and the then president of the FISA, for the benefit of television coverage – the introduction of a safety car, or pace car, as it is known in IndyCar racing, from which the idea was imported. Its purpose is to slow cars down in the event of an accident while marshals clear the track. Ostensibly introduced as a safety move, its purpose, in fact, was to avoid lengthy restarts, which, it was feared, encouraged bored viewers to switch to another channel. It was a move that was greeted with some opposition by Mosley’s more conservative colleagues, who objected to the principle of copying an American tactic. Others, including Ayrton Senna, objected for safety reasons.

  Senna was among the drivers who were concerned that the slowness of the safety car could cause tyre pressure to drop dramatically and crucially affect the car’s handling. Before the start of a race, electric-blanket tyre-warmers – illegal in IndyCar racing but for reasons of cost rather than safety – are fitted to wheels to pre-heat tyres to a certain temperature. The temperature is increased and maintained by friction during the race, but if it drops, so does the air pressure, which can make a Formula One car virtually undrivable. Senna was said to have been sufficiently concerned that he expressed his misgivings at the drivers’ briefing before his fateful race, but in vain.

  Until recent years Ecclestone was little known outside of the sports pages, and even then he kept a low profile, happy to quietly work away on his next multi-million-dollar deal. When he did make the news it was invariably because of off-the-cuff remarks that reinforced an image he seemed to go out of his way to cultivate, of a hard-headed character with a heart of stone to match. He didn’t appear to care what people thought of what he said or did.

  Likening Senna’s ‘public death’ to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ had its insensitive equal in his comment on the death in a flying accident of 32-year-old Brazilian Carlos Pace, who was second driver for the Brabham team owned by that time by Ecclestone. Of his reaction to Pace’s death, he said: ‘If I felt anything, it was that he shouldn’t have been fooling around with light aircraft. He took enough risks as it was, without having to fly as well.’8 And seven months before Senna’s fatal accident, he had been quoted by motor-racing correspondents Bob McKenzie and Oliver Holt, in the Daily Express and The Times respectively, as saying that drivers’ deaths were a form of ‘natural culling’. In the furore that followed, he denied making the comment, insisting that he did not even know what the word meant. McKenzie and Holt declined to comment on Ecclestone’s denial.

  Yet Ecclestone would not deny what would seem to many to be a cold, calculated attitude: Sure, they risk their lives, he would concede, and that’s why they are paid tens of millions of dollars a year. Besides, as a result of improved safety regulations, in the fourteen years prior to Senna’s death there had been only two fatal accidents. Formula One isn’t a technical confrontation run for the benefit of the teams, he would argue, or staged for spectators prepared to take out a small mortgage to pay for a Grand Prix ticket. It is, based on figures supplied by Ecclestone’s company, Formula One Management Ltd, the world’s biggest televised sport, viewed in 2000 by a staggering total of 53 billion people in 195 countries, compared with 33.4 billion television viewers in 196 countries who watched the 1998 World Cup in France, and 19.6 billion viewers in 200 countries who watched the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, the last time cumulative figures were used by the International Olympic Committee to calculate viewing figures. But basing the total number of viewers on cumulative figures can be deceptive.

  For example, the cumulative total claimed by Formula One Management includes not only the audience for the races themselves, including qualifying, free-practice and warm-up sessions, but sports programmes, which might briefly feature footage of a Formula One race, and news broadcasts. It is the news broadcast figures that hugely inflate the figures claimed by Formula One Management. According to a leading UK sports marketing survey company, it is a format that is ‘somewhat misleading. If, say, the news is broadcast that Michael Schumacher has won a particular Grand Prix, then the viewing audience figure of that news programme is included.’ Once news broadcasts are stripped out, the figures tell a somewhat different story. Monitoring of programmes dedicated to Formula One has put the global audience figure at a much reduced 4.5 billion. In a sport of smoke and mirrors, news broadcasts were first included in 1993 to dramatically boost dedicated viewing figures that had actually fallen by 12.5 per cent. Said Ecclestone: ‘I don’t know anything about this, because the only figures we put out are the ones given to us by broadcasters. We take whatever figures broadcasters give us.’

  The promotion of Formula One, by fair means or foul, has consumed almost 30 years of Bernie Ecclestone’s life. He has survived supremely in a world of lies and deception, unscrupulous power politics and corruption, perpetrated by men with egos the size of Africa, to become one of the richest men in the world. This indeed is Bernie’s game.

  Notes

  1. Life at the Limit, Professor Sid Watkins, Macmillan.

  2. Autosport, 12 May 1994.

  3. Sunday Business, 30 March 1997.

  4. Associated Press, 7 November 1997.

  5. Mail on Sunday, 20 September 1992.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Autosport, 4 August 1994.

  8. Autosport, 16 July 1977.

  2

  HOW AUNTIE MAY CHANGED YOUNG BERNARD’S LIFE FOR EVER

  St Peter South Elmham is a rural backwater of little more than a row of houses and a church, the kind of place you pass through on your way to somewhere else. It is located three miles from Bungay, an ancient and charmingly soporific town in east Suffolk, and more easily located on an Ordnance Survey map. It was here, on Tuesday 28 October 1930, that the name of Bernard Charles Ecclestone was added to the hamlet’s roll of noble sons. The event took place at Hawk House, a converted public house of that name situated next door to the early twelfth-
century St Peter’s Church, and the home of his grandmother, Rose Westley, who may well have played the role of midwife.

  Ecclestone’s mother, Bertha, then 23, and his father, Sidney, 27, had married at St Peter’s Church three years earlier and set up home in the nearby village of Wissett, which comprised a few tied cottages, a church, a shop, a garage and a school. But with her husband, a fisherman, often away at sea from September to early December with a herring fleet that fished out of the coastal town of Lowestoft some 20 miles away, Bertha spent much of her time during the winter months at her mother’s home. In this rustic environment, where fishing and farming were the main industries, young Ecclestone spent his early childhood, either in St Peter South Elmham or in Wissett. His temperament, it seems, reflected the isolation of his surroundings; he was known as a child who preferred his own company. He also began to display signs of a trait that in later years would become a dominant feature of his business style.

  His cousin, Pauline, the daughter of his mother’s brother, Godfrey, vividly remembers the tantrums of a fractious child who ‘was always wanting his own way’. There was, she recalls, the occasion of a village celebration to mark the Silver Jubilee of King George IV and Queen Mary on 6 May 1935, when the two five-year-olds were invited to pose for a photograph. She was dressed as a nurse in a blue and white crêpe-paper uniform and he as a wounded soldier with bandages round his head and leg. ‘He was supposed to hold my hand for a photograph, but he just wouldn’t do it,’ says Pauline. ‘There was such a fuss.’

  Around this time, his mother’s younger sister, May, had qualified as a nurse and shortly began work at Westhill Hospital in Dartford, Kent, on the outskirts of London, where she met and married a local fishmonger, Arthur Birmingham. They moved to a house in King Edward’s Avenue, Dartford, a decision of little significance other than for the bearing it would have on young Bernard’s life. For May, the youngest of four children, was the favourite of her mother, Rose Westley, who, deeply upset by the thought of her daughter living so far away, decided to sell her home in St Peter South Elmham – the father of her children was no longer on the scene – and move to Dartford. It was a decision that in turn upset Bertha, the second youngest, who was no less grieved by the thought of her mother moving so far away.