Bernie Ecclestone

by Terry Lovell

  The two-car Brabham team, run in those days on a budget of £100,000 a year, was no more than seven strong and the Formula One workshop was virtually open all hours. Herbie Blash, who rejoined Brabham as team manager for the start of the 1973 season, said: ‘You had to be a workaholic or crazy. You had to dedicate your life to the team. But you would give your right arm to work for a Formula One team, so basically you were working for very little and you were working night and day.’ Blash, though, became one of Ecclestone’s keenest fans, applauding not only his business acumen but also what he described as his ‘compassion’.

  ‘Bernie’s a very caring person. Only the people who have been looked after by Bernie realise that he is a very caring person. An example is Jochen Rindt. When Jochen was killed, Colin Chapman [the Lotus team boss] just left Italy immediately, and it was left to Bernie to sort everything out.’ And when, he pointed out, Frank Williams had his car accident in 1986 on his way to Nice Airport after a Nigel Mansell testing session at the Paul Ricard circuit, which would leave him a paraplegic, it was ‘Bernie who arranged the flight home. If anybody ever suffered in any way, he always ensured they had the very best treatment available.’ Ecclestone is also blessed, added Blash, with a lightning-fast brain. ‘He has this natural ability to calculate complex sets of numbers and percentages in amazingly quick times. At a business meeting he would leave people for dead.’

  But, in the Brabham factory, while men like Blash and Goozée could understand the need to adopt new working practices, there was general alarm caused by Ecclestone’s mood swings. The good days for staff and mechanics were those that he spent at the premises of his car showroom in Bexleyheath, from where he controlled his various business interests. Senior mechanic Bob Dance said: ‘You could never be sure whether he’d be in a good mood or a bad mood, when he could be pretty unpleasant.’ Apparently, mud splashes on his car as he drove along the unmade gravel road leading up to the works, or the sight of an office door left open, would be enough to ignite his hair-trigger temper. ‘I once saw him throw a phone across the room because it rang during a meeting,’ said Dance.

  Colin Seeley was also stunned by Ecclestone’s sudden outbursts. Displeased for some reason with bodywork being fitted to a prototype of the BT38, Brabham’s first production-car monocoque, Ecclestone expressed his anger in an extremely direct manner. ‘He stamped all over the bodywork, breaking it up,’ said Seeley. On a later occasion Ecclestone arrived in the production workshop to find a cleaner using a pay telephone. The call came to a sudden end when Ecclestone ripped the phone off the wall. ‘It was frightening to see him in that state,’ said Seeley.

  Another new boy to enter the Brabham crucible was Keith Greene, aged 33, a former Formula One driver whose modest five-year career between 1958 and 1962 was funded by his father’s company, Gilby Engineering. He was appointed team manager responsible for looking after the cars of Graham Hill, Carlos Reutemann and Wilson Fittipaldi. Greene, a Formula One competitions manager who had enjoyed considerable touring car championship success with Alan Mann Racing, was approached for the job by Ecclestone soon after he bought Motor Racing Developments. But he too would soon feel the lash of his dictatorial boss’s tongue.

  At a meeting with Ecclestone and the drivers, one of whom was complaining that his car was not getting as much attention as he felt it should, Greene, who had been under a lot of pressure from a heavy workload of long days and weekends, uncharacteristically flared up. Ecclestone turned on him and snapped: ‘Shut up – or piss off.’ It was a humiliatingly public rebuff to Greene, but, in need of the job, he decided to shut up.

  But for all Ecclestone’s bellicosity, Greene became a firm admirer. ‘Yes, he was extremely hard, but also extremely clever. He is extraordinary, make no mistake about that. In the business world, he is a genius. A part of that asset, which is obviously God-given, is a fantastic retentive brain. He remembers every detail. He’ll remember if a mechanic stole a nut and bolt 20 years ago, so you had to be sharp to keep up with him. He could call you up at any time during the night – he used to have about four hours’ sleep a night – and whatever it was you had to have the answers. He wasn’t interested in excuses.’

  Greene even came to admire Ecclestone’s no-nonsense style of decision-making. Recalling the Argentine Grand Prix in 1972, when there was some friction between Graham Hill and the Argentinian Carlos Reutemann over their engines, Ecclestone summoned Greene and asked for the list of engine numbers. ‘Bernie said: “Right, I’m not having any more arguments with these drivers. What we are going to do now is decide their engines for the year, OK?” So he got the drivers to alternately call out heads or tails while he flipped a coin and that decided who would have which engines for the year. Once the “draw” had finished, he said: “I don’t want to hear any more about engines”, and he was gone.’ And, confirmed Bob Dance, there were no further complaints.

  However, the level of pressure – ‘you felt all the time that you were totally his’ – through working more than 100 hours a week caused Greene to quit after just 12 months, following a request for a salary increase. Responsible for transport, running the Formula One workshop, engineering one or more of the cars, liaising between Murray, the drivers and the chief mechanic, taking care of job sheets for the cars, and even the team’s limited public-relations efforts, Greene asked Ecclestone for an extra £10 a week. He had, he said, difficulty in even eliciting a response. ‘I spent several weeks walking down the drive by the side of his Merc asking for that tenner, which wasn’t even a packet of fags to Bernie, and he kept saying, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll think about it.” But he spent a bit too long thinking about it and I was out of there.’

  As the owner of the Brabham team, Ecclestone took up his seat within the Formula One Constructors’ Association (F1CA), an organisation set up to represent the interests of the team owners, a disparate and querulous bunch of maverick characters, among whom he would have felt immediately at home. It was the base on which King Bernie would set his throne, and from which would flow Croesian riches that even he couldn’t have imagined.

  Notes

  1. Autosport, 6 August 1987.

  2. Independent, 9 July 1988.

  3. Guardian, December 1997.

  4. How Entrepreneurs Get Started, Rupert Steiner.

  5. Daily Express, 14 February 1972.

  4

  THE ‘GARAGISTES’ TAKE ON THE FIA ‘GRANDIS’

  Until 1957, when Vanwall, with Stirling Moss and Tony Brooks sharing the car, became the first British team to win a championship round by winning the British Grand Prix at Aintree, Formula One had been the almost exclusive domain of the continental manufacturers, such as Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo and Mercedes-Benz, whose road-car production financed their race programmes. During the late forties and fifties they dominated the formula introduced in 1946 by the Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI), a body set up to represent the motor sport interests of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), formerly the Association Internationale des Automobile Clubs Reconnus, which had been responsible for reviving Grand Prix racing at the Bois de Boulogne circuit, Paris, on 9 September 1945.

  Formula One proved so successful that the FIA followed the lead of the Fédération Internationale Motocycliste, which in 1949 had launched the first motorcycle World Championship – and on 13 May 1950 the first round of theFormula One World Championship series took place with the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, a former military bomber base in Northamptonshire, where 21 cars lined up on the grid. In perfect weather and in the presence of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, 100,000 spectators watched 43-year-old Italian Nino Farina enter the archives as the winner of the first Formula One World Championship. Driving an Alfa Romeo 158, he completed the 70 laps in 2 hours 13 minutes and 23.6 seconds. Briton Leslie Johnson found his own place in the archives – as the first driver to retire in a Grand Prix, when the supercharger on his E-type ERA packed up during the second lap. D
espite the World Championship title, it was very much a European affair, with Britain, Monaco, Switzerland, Belgium and France hosting the rounds. The organisers included a US Grand Prix, which was, in fact, the Indy 500 race at Indianapolis, in a token attempt to ‘globalise’ the series, until it was dropped from the calendar in 1960.

  These were the legend-making days of five-times world champion Juan Fangio, Alberto Ascari and Farina, who ended the 1950 season by becoming the first Formula One world champion; of the gentlemanly blazer-and-flannels brigade to whom the talk of money was unseemly; of the likes of amateur driver Eric Thompson, a Lloyds marine insurance broker, who drove in a ski jacket and trousers tucked into his socks, and was paid £82 2s 2d, which included bonuses from Esso and Dunlop, for coming fifth in a Connaught in the 1955 British Grand Prix; of the grass paddocks at Goodwood, where, for five shillings, the public could stand next to their demigods and machines; of ‘privateers’ of inherited or self-made wealth who, in lower formulae, financed drivers in 20-lap races at Goodwood, Silverstone, Snetterton, Crystal Palace and Charterhall; and of the majestic Stirling Moss, whose gross earnings, as the world’s highest-paid driver in 1961, totalled £32,700. But such innocent, halycon days were even then numbered by the rapid progress of events that would take place over the next decade or two.

  By the end of the fifties, the supremacy of the manufacturers, whose successes had bred a complacency which would leave them fatally vulnerable, was no longer taken for granted. But the real challenge came not from Vanwall, who in 1958 won the inaugural Constructors’ Championship, or the other British competitors at that time, British Racing Motors (BRM) and Connaught Engineering, relatively wealthy entrants who followed the manufacturers’ standard front-engine design. It came from the garage in Surbiton, Surrey, of father and son Charles and John Cooper, who constructed Formula Three cars around chain-drive 500cc engines and off-the-shelf components from gearboxes to suspension parts, which, in austere, post-war Britain, gave the less well-off an entry into car racing.

  The first Formula One Cooper car, the T20, made its debut in the 1952 Swiss Grand Prix with a 2-litre Bristol engine, but it wasn’t until the Argentine Grand Prix in 1958 that the Coopers’ single-seater bob-tailed Formula Three car, with a twin-cam Climax engine situated at the rear, made its stunning debut. Driven by Stirling Moss and built for the aristocratic Rob Walker – he gave his occupation as ‘gentleman’ on his passport – it was probably viewed by the manufacturers with amused curiosity. If so, they would not be amused for long. With less frontal area and the driver much lower in the cockpit, the nimbler car proved lighter and faster than the more powerful 2.5-litre Ferraris and Maseratis as Moss left them in his slipstream to take the chequered flag. It was the beginning of a revolutionary development in the design and construction of Formula One cars.

  The 1958 season was significant for two other reasons. Firstly, it heralded the arrival, at the Monaco Grand Prix, of Colin Chapman’s Team Lotus. It was Chapman’s creative genius that developed and refined the rear-engine Cooper concept, introduced the monocoque chassis, experimented with aerodynamic wings and, perhaps most far-reaching of all, defied the establishment to embrace major commercial sponsorship. Secondly, it confirmed the arrival of a new wave of driving talent led by the British. Mike Hawthorn became the first British world champion, with Stirling Moss, Tony Brooks, Roy Salvadori and Peter Collins occupying the next four slots in the 1958 World Championship series. Britain was supplying the men as well as the machines. About to add their weight to the ranks of the constructors were the likes of Jack Brabham, who left Cooper to set up his own team with Ron Tauranac in 1962, New Zealander Bruce McLaren, who also quit Cooper to form his own team in 1966 and, in 1967, former Formula Three mechanic and driver Frank Williams, who would receive a knighthood in 1999 for his services to motor sport. All, in their own unique ways, would soon grace the Formula One stage.

  At the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix, another historic day in new technology took place, when the design skills of Chapman’s Team Lotus and Keith Duckworth’s Ford Cosworth DFV 3-litre V8 engine produced the Lotus 49 driven by Jim Clark, who, until his tragic death, was considered the greatest driver of the sixties. He crossed the finishing line 23.8 seconds ahead of Jack Brabham in the Repco V8-powered Brabham BT19. The Cosworth, on its first outing, would soon establish itself as the most radical engine since the Coventry Climax, eliminating all opposition until the emergence of turbocharged engines brought about the Cosworth V8’s final victory – the last of an astonishing 155 wins – in 1983. The sixties had begun with 1.5-litre engines developing 160bhp and standard narrow tyres, and ended with the Cosworth V8 developing close to 440bhp and new tyre technology producing increasingly wider tyres.

  In addition to Chapman’s pioneering contributions, the decade also saw the introduction of transistorised ignition and fuel injection. To the haughty and imperial Enzo Ferrari, known as ‘Il Commendatore’, the constructors were mere parvenus playing around with car kits, whom he had mockingly described as ‘garagistes’. All the same, while Ferrari and the continental manufacturers had been the driving force of the past, the ‘garagistes’, whose number in 1970 was further increased by the arrival of new kids on the grid – the Tyrrell Racing Organisation, Team Surtees and March Engineering – were the driving force of the future. And, unlike Ferrari, and the other manufacturers, they had to cope with constant financial pressures in the days when sponsorship meant little more than free oil and tyres, and then only for the more successful.

  A substantial part of the constructors’ income came from the production of custom-built cars for the specialist commercial market, plus ‘start’ money paid by the Grands Prix organisers or promoters, but even this would depend on their judgement of a team’s public appeal. For the likes of Ferrari and Lotus, whose epic clashes attracted audiences in their tens of thousands, it was never an issue: organisers were happy to pay them a large part of their ‘start’ money budget, leaving the crumbs for the smaller teams. Only the likes of Rob Walker, who had the crowd-pulling skills of Stirling Moss, were able to negotiate more than a few hundred pounds. The organisers held the whip hand, particularly at prestigious Grands Prix such as the Italian or Monaco, the biggest event in the racing calendar, and which, they well knew, a team couldn’t afford to miss if it wanted to make its name. It was a desperate state of affairs for teams way down the grid – and a grossly unfair one. In the fifties, perhaps eight to ten cars were regular competitors. Now, in the early seventies, there were as many as 25, most of them living off overdrafts and the Micawberesque hopes of tomorrow.

  The presence of the ‘garagistes’ greatly increased the number of spectators, which, in turn, substantially increased the organisers’ profits. But the constructors saw little of it. On occasion they saw none at all. It was not unknown, for example, for an organiser to claim that the race hadn’t attracted the anticipated number of spectators, smartly adding that it was therefore not possible to pay the agreed ‘start’ money. Even a team such as Lotus was not immune from this ploy. At the end of one Italian Grand Prix two heavies physically removed team manager Andrew Ferguson from the organiser’s office after he had been refused payment of the agreed fee. Such dubious ethics, though, were not always one-sided: some teams entered a no-hope second or even third car purely for the ‘start’ money, knowing full well that they would do well to complete a lap.

  It was these uncertain days that gave birth to what over the next two decades would become the most powerful force in Formula One – the Formula One Constructors’ Association (F1CA). It was modelled on the Formula 2 Association, which was formed in late 1963 to represent the interests of English constructors Lotus, Brabham and Cooper, who had agreed to compete the following year in the Grands Prix de France, a series of Formula Two races organised by the French motor-sports body, the Fédération Française du Sport Automobile (FFSA), to take place at Pau, Reims, Rouen, Clermont-Ferrand and Albi. It worked sufficiently well to prompt the constructors
to form a similar association for Formula One, which, for reasons related to personalities, did not include in those days Louis Stanley’s BRM or Enzo Ferrari’s team, the former being considered too domineering and the latter too disdainful. Its administration was carried out by Ferguson, who, at Colin Chapman’s invitation, agreed to look after its affairs in return for an annual fee of £15 per team. Two years later, in 1966, it was being run from Ferguson’s home, a cottage adjoining Chapman’s splendid Carleton Manor, at East Carleton, Norwich.

  In these more placid days the F1CA did little more than oversee the coordination of transportation costs, particularly to transcontinental Grands Prix. It was a benign, low-key and loosely grouped organisation of no serious political intent, but events across the English Channel were soon to change its disposition. The catalyst was a long-simmering domestic power battle between the FFSA and the French motoring organization, the Automobile Club de France (ACF), which prevented British drivers from competing in France and French drivers from competing outside of France. Without formal association with the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the F1CA could only look on impotently from the sidelines. It led to a meeting at a London hotel on 4 December 1967 between the F1CA, the British Grand Prix Drivers Association (BGPDA), represented by Swedish driver Joakim Bonnier, and the Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI), which governed motor sport on behalf of the FIA.

  Its purpose was to strengthen the links between the CSI and constructors and drivers, but primarily with the F1CA, which wanted a voice within the FIA’s decision-making bureaucracy. The best it got was an agreement that regular meetings would take place between the CSI and the F1CA to discuss matters affecting the constructors and drivers. Nevertheless, the constructors had taken their first step in the political arena, albeit one that remained dominated by the self-important aristos of the French and German motor clubs. It was a stage made for the brash, aggressive and ego-pricking style of Ecclestone, who, in 1972, as the self-made millionaire boss of the Brabham team, arrived on the grid in time for the first serious clash with organisers keen to keep the ‘kit-car’ constructors in their place.