by Terry Lovell
O’Connor and Ecclestone used to travel together to different locations in the UK, such as the then Midland Hotel in Manchester, to meet groups of dealers among whom vehicles would be bought and sold during night-long trading sessions. At these gatherings it was not uncommon for the two men to earn profit on non-existent cars. O’Connor, for example, would introduce a car for a certain price, which would be sold from dealer to dealer. It was crucial that, at the end of business, it was bought back by O’Connor or Ecclestone at a price less than they had sold it for in the first place. If it left them for, say, £600, and was bought back for £400, a nice profit of £200 could be pocketed. If not, they could end up out of pocket. It was similar, said Ecclestone, to the Stock Exchange dealing known as ‘selling short’: selling shares about to dive, buying them back when they hit rock bottom, and then selling them for a handsome profit once they have recovered. ‘I tell you, there’s nothing new in life.’
Croker bought Ecclestone’s second-hand motorcycle business in September 1959. ‘He struck me as a being a shrewd and charming man,’ said Croker, ‘but he had this funny thing about cleanliness. He was always washing his hands, straightening his tie and making sure there wasn’t a speck of dust about. I thought there was something wrong with the man.’ Croker’s ownership of Compton & Ecclestone was brief – and disastrous.
Gross mismanagement by a trusted employee, he said, led to serious financial problems which required a considerable bank loan to shore up the business. But it wasn’t enough to prevent the collapse of not only Compton & Ecclestone but also Croker’s other companies. Just two months after signing the deal with Ecclestone, he was forced to accept an offer for the business from O’Connor and White. The demise of his various companies led to the loss of his luxury home, several properties and his brand-new Rolls-Royce. Twenty-eight years later Croker, whose business fortunes never recovered, ended up living in a two-bedroom council flat in Canning Town, east London.
Ecclestone’s fortunes, though, continued in their ascendancy, despite a fire that razed to the ground the premises of James Spencer (Bexleyheath) Ltd in the mid-sixties. The efficient way in which Ecclestone was able to recover from the calamity astonished those who saw the fire damage. One of the witnesses to the aftermath was motor dealer Bobby Rowe, who quit the motor trade in the early seventies to earn substantial wealth through property investment, but who at that time leased from Ecclestone the former Harcourt Motor Cycles premises. As he was passing by at 10 o’clock at night, he saw firemen damping down the smouldering debris of the showroom and burnt-out cars within it. Yet what he saw the following morning on his way to his business left him highly impressed. He said: ‘By eight o’clock that morning – this is no exaggeration – those cars were all gone, the showroom was all swept out, there was a Portakabin on the front, complete with telephones, and he was back in business, with cars on the forecourt.’
From the ashes emerged a new showroom and offices so impressive in design and décor – the walls displayed murals of cars painted by Ecclestone himself and sufficiently skilled to prompt admiring comments – that fellow car dealer Jimmy Oliver used to take colleagues to see the ‘fabulous’ showroom. When another former associate remarked how clean and smart the showroom looked, Ecclestone replied: ‘Yeah, the trouble is, people come in and spoil it.’ During a heavy winter snowfall his concern that customers would make a mess of the showroom floor prompted him to phone the local council to demand that the snow outside his premises be removed. Unhappy with the indifferent response, he arranged for it to be shovelled into the roadway to obstruct passing traffic. It had the desired result: council workmen soon arrived to clear it. A garage at the rear of the premises, used to service cars before being displayed in the showroom, was also noted for its immaculate condition, with white tiles covering the floor and walls. ‘Nobody in the trade had ever seen anything like that before,’ said Frederick Compton. ‘He was the first to think of it.’
Ecclestone’s social life, then as now, had no pretensions. He enjoyed playing the guessing game spoof in the pubs and a serious flutter on the gaming tables – ‘he was a great gambler,’ said a former friend – at the Beaverwood, then a top nightclub in Chiselhurst, Kent, where the likes of Tom Jones would pull in the crowds. During the day, when he bothered to have lunch, it would frequently be at a working men’s cafe about half a mile down the road from the James Spencer showroom, to which he and Bobby Rowe would race, there and back, on their motorbikes. But his main social activity was regular visits to Brands Hatch, where he was introduced by ‘Pops’ Lewis-Evans, a well-known and much-liked figure in the motor-racing world, to his son, Stuart, who was establishing a reputation as a racer ready to challenge the best.
Stuart made his debut in a Grand Prix car at an Easter meeting at Goodwood in 1957 – the year his father retired following a serious crash – after winning more continental events in the 500cc Cooper class than any other driver. He drove the latest Connaught at the invitation of its designer, Rodney Clarke, to beat the likes of Stirling Moss and Tony Brooks. A month later he was in the Connaught again, making his Grand Prix debut at Monaco, where he came a very creditable fourth. His performance led to Tony Vandervell signing him up for his Vanwall team, alongside Brooks and Moss, who described his new colleague as ‘very, very fast’. A few months later, in only his fourth outing in a Grand Prix car, he lapped the Reims circuit at 129mph, only a fifth of a second slower than world champion Juan Fangio, in a Maserati.
Ecclestone, six months younger than 27-year-old Stuart Lewis-Evans, developed a friendship with him, and regularly attended his races. He saw in Lewis-Evans perhaps what he secretly desired – the skills to be a world-class racer. He attempted to advance his friend’s potential when Connaught Engineering, founded by Rodney Clarke and Mike Oliver in 1948, encountered serious financial difficulties after its principal backer, Kenneth McAlpine, a director of a well-known British building company, withdrew his support. Oliver and Clarke, whose cars had swept the board at Formula Two events attended principally by privateers, were also hit by a restructuring of the formulae, which pitched Connaught against works teams in Formula One. By the beginning of 1957 – two years earlier Tony Brooks had a stunning triumph in a Connaught at the Syracuse Grand Prix in Sicily, the first Englishman to win an overseas Grand Prix since Henry Segrave won The Grand Prix, as the French Grand Prix was known in those days, in June 1923 – the writing was clearly on the wall.
According to more recent newspaper reports, Ecclestone went out and bought the entire Connaught team. As with his imaginary BSc, his Who’s Who listing claims ownership of the team. But, again, not quite true. He bought two cars – the B3, described as the ‘toothpaste tube’ model, and the B7 – that came under the hammer of auctioneers Goddard, Davison and Smith in September 1957. Six Connaughts were sold for between £1600 and £2100. Two, the C8 and B6, were withdrawn after failing to reach the reserve price. ‘The company was certainly not bought by Bernie Ecclestone in any way at all,’ said Oliver. ‘He was simply one of a number of purchasers at the auction.’
Stuart Lewis-Evans and another young talented driver, Roy Salvadori, raced the cars in the New Zealand Grand Prix at Ardmore in January 1958. But Ecclestone’s motive for entering them had less to do with any expectation of success – Salvadori, plagued by an engine misfire, finished a poor fifth, and Lewis-Evans was eliminated by loss of oil pressure, all of which was too much for the one mechanic hired by Ecclestone to cope with – than with the opportunity to sell them on to an Australian or New Zealand market where such cars were keenly sought after. The ‘start’ money negotiated by Ecclestone with the organisers made a substantial contribution to their transportation costs.
Lewis-Evans had been instructed by Ecclestone to handle their sale. Not the sharpest of businessmen, he was on the verge of exchanging the two cars for a stamp collection when Salvadori urged him to first get Ecclestone’s approval. The response was short and clear. The cars were shipped backed to England. O
ne or two other drivers raced them but without notable success, including Ecclestone himself, who attempted to qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix in 1958, a performance that did little to enhance his reputation as a driver. Although he was one of the 14 out of 30 entries who failed to qualify, his effort was described in the record books as ‘not a serious attempt’.1
At one stage Ecclestone had hoped to build a Formula One team around Lewis-Evans and the Connaughts. But, happy at Vanwall, where he had established his reputation, Lewis-Evans declined the invitation. With his plans still-born on the drawing board, Ecclestone settled for a role as the racer’s unofficial agent, principally advising him on his business affairs. It was an arrangement that, tragically, did not last long. At the age of 28, the driver described by world champion Mike Hawthorn as ‘one of the best up-and-coming British drivers’ died after his car crashed and burst into flames in the Moroccan Grand Prix in Casablanca on 19 October 1958. He was flown to Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, Sussex, where he died from his burns six days later. Within a matter of weeks Tony Vandervell, said to have been guilt-stricken over Lewis-Evans’s death, suffered a heart attack. He recovered but was unable to recapture his enthusiasm for the sport. The Vanwall team lost its competitive edge and gradually faded from Formula One after the French Grand Prix in 1960, six years after its debut at the British Grand Prix.
Ecclestone also disappeared, temporarily, from the Formula One scene, only to emerge, as newspapers later claimed, to race in a team set up by seven-times world champion motorcyclist Phil Read. Glamorous stuff, but not true. He did sponsor a couple of motorcyclists, one of them being Bobby Rowe, whom he supplied with a 500cc Norton for the Isle of Man TT in 1959, where Rowe received a newcomer’s award. It was the only year that Rowe made any money out of racing, thanks to Ecclestone organising a sponsorship deal with Shell. He notched up the odd win, and an occasional second and third, but little more. Ecclestone missed one win, at Brands Hatch, when it started to rain. With everyone else in greasy leathers, he arrived immaculately dressed in a suit and highly polished shoes. As the rain threatened his sartorial elegance, he became tired of tiptoeing round the puddles to protect his shoes, and made an early exit.
Back in the office, Ecclestone, over the next decade, began to expand his business activities to include hire-purchase finance and property. The hire-purchase company was called Arvin Securities and formed in March 1961. It was based at the premises of James Spencer (Bexleyheath) Ltd, which was given the address of Arvin House to promote a more substantial image. Ecclestone was now able to offer his customers an extra service – a credit facility to buy his cars. It was a lucrative one. Dealers able to finance their own hire-purchase agreements made more money through the interest on the loan than on the sale of the car. In 1968 Ecclestone set up a similar company at the same address offering the same services under the name of Arvin Credit Facilities. His property interests began with a company called Pentbridge Properties Ltd and, later, Pentbridge Services. He had also acquired a sizeable plot of land in Manor Road, Erith, Kent, where he had three single-storey buildings constructed for leasing to small companies. It was there, in 1969, that he opened a car auctions company, Mid-Week Car Auctions, and where, in the very early days, it was not unknown for Ecclestone himself to pick up the auctioneer’s gavel.
Shortly after the mid-sixties he began moving around the Formula One circuits again. Through his friendship with privateer John Cooper, he met in 1967 a young Austrian called Jochen Rindt, who had joined Bruce McLaren in the Cooper team two years earlier following an impressive showing in Formula Two. In 1968, with the Cooper cars considered to be uncompetitive, Rindt signed for the Brabham team as number two to Jack Brabham. Over the ensuing months a firm friendship developed between the two – Rindt was the first to call Ecclestone ‘Bernie’ rather than ‘Bernard’ – on and off the track. It extended to the gaming tables of Acapulco during the 1968 Mexican Grand Prix, which Rindt, in a Brabham-Repco, failed to finish through ignition failure. It was a friendship, though, founded on a mutual admiration rather than social interests: if Ecclestone was a fervent admirer of Rindt’s skills and the business potential they offered, Rindt was no less impressed by Ecclestone’s shrewdness as a negotiator. Such was his faith in Ecclestone’s astuteness that Rindt was happy for him to represent his interests when in late 1968 the Lotus team boss, Colin Chapman, who had just signed a controversial £100,000 sponsorship deal with Imperial Tobacco, approached him with an offer to join the Lotus team to become joint number-one driver with Graham Hill following the death that April of the brilliant double world champion Jim Clark at a Formula Two event in Hockenheim, Germany.
On Ecclestone’s recommendation, Rindt agreed to leave Brabham, which was going through a bad spell. Widely considered the most daring and aggressively skilful driver of his day, Rindt came fourth, behind Bruce McLaren, Jacky Ickx and Jackie Stewart in the 1969 World Championship. Towards the end of that year Ecclestone, no doubt sensing the time was right to put their business association on a more formal footing, proposed, in the days when it was not unusual for top drivers to race virtually every weekend in different formulae, that they went into partnership to set up a Formula Two team. At the same time he would become Rindt’s manager. The Austrian agreed, and in January 1970 Jochen Rindt Racing was formed. Clearly, Ecclestone was ever determined to establish his presence in motor racing. But, as with Lewis-Evans, it was a partnership that would end tragically.
Eight months later 28-year-old Rindt died during the Saturday practice session at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, when his Lotus 72 veered sharp left, as he was under-braking, into the Parabolica, diving under the Armco crash barriers and bouncing back on to the track. He refused to wear crutch straps on his harness, and his throat was cut by the seat-belt buckle after he was thrust deep into his cockpit. In addition he suffered severe chest injuries. Ecclestone was the first person to reach Rindt, who was barely still alive and died, at least officially, in hospital. The trackside medical facilities were so haphazard that he was taken to the wrong hospital in a Volkswagen ambulance after the driver lost his way. ‘With the medical facilities we have today, he would have had a better chance of surviving,’ said Ecclestone. After winning five Grands Prix with three more races to go, Rindt had done enough to become the first driver to win the World Championship title posthumously. Of his decision to move to Lotus, Ecclestone said: ‘I recommended he took the offer [from Colin Chapman] because I wanted him to be world champion. But, sure, there were a couple of things I wasn’t happy about, safety being one of them. Chapman tended to push things to the limit.’ He added: ‘But if the [track] safety regulations we have today had been in place then, he would have survived.’
More prophetically than Rindt could possibly have imagined, he had said of his manager: ‘You should keep an eye on little people like … Bernie Ecclestone because he has big ambitions and the drive to achieve them.’2 Shortly before his death, Rindt had, in fact, already and unknowingly played an instrumental role in laying the ground for Ecclestone to achieve his ambitions, not least the ownership of his own Formula One team, which would herald the beginning of a remarkable career and culminate in his iron grip on Formula One.
Notes
1. The Grand Prix Who’s Who, Steve Small, Guinness.
2. Autocar, 4 October 1973.
3
THE RISE TO RICHES OF BRABHAM’S NEW BOSS
Ron Tauranac had had enough. The tall, rangy Australian, known as a tough, prickly but deeply caring man, believed the time had come to get out of Formula One. Like many of his day, he had graduated the hard way, in times when design and technology were largely a suck-it-and-see science and the financial rewards were slim indeed. He had been a leading name in car design for most of the sixties, soon after setting up in business with fellow Australian Jack Brabham, whom he had known back home in Sydney in the late forties. In those days Brabham was driving Midgets and hill-climbing, and, with necessity truly proving to
be the mother of invention, they machined car parts they couldn’t buy, with Tauranac constructing Formula Three cars around 500cc motorbike engines.
Their friendship was interrupted by Brabham’s decision – prompted by a suggestion from Dean Delamont, the competition manager of Britain’s Royal Automobile Club (RAC), at a New Zealand Grand Prix – to move to England to test his skills in the European arena. He arrived in 1954, but, racing in non-competitive cars, made little impact. He took part in 16 Grands Prix – finishing nine – before he won his first Grand Prix at Monaco in 1959 in the radical rear-engine Cooper T51, opening a season which he concluded by becoming world champion at the age of 33. On the strength of his success, Brabham, keen to set up his own team and car production company, sent a return air ticket to Tauranac with an invitation to try the water for six months. Tauranac, who was actually born in Gillingham, Kent, but whose parents emigrated to Australia when he was three, believed such a move had to be all or nothing – and used the money to buy one-way tickets on a ship for his wife, Norma, and their three-year-old daughter, Jann, while he flew to Los Angeles to be with Brabham, who was racing in a sports-car event at Riverside, before flying to England ahead of his family’s arrival in March 1960, the year when Brabham won his second World Championship.