Bernie Ecclestone

by Terry Lovell

It was in Murray’s ‘triangular’ BT44, based on the BT42 and driven by Carlos Reutemann, that, at the South African Grand Prix in 1974, the Brabham team scored its first win under Ecclestone’s ownership. It was also an occasion for Ecclestone to exercise his roguish sense of humour at the expense of John Goossens, then a senior executive of Texaco Belgium’s marketing division, which, with Marlboro, had succeeded in luring the 1972 world champion Emerson Fittipaldi away from Lotus to join McLaren. Fittipaldi, who had come second in the 1973 series, had just won the Brazilian Grand Prix, the second race of the new season.

  Ecclestone and Goossens had been playing gin rummy for two days, with Ecclestone coming out the loser to the tune of about $1000. ‘It was enough to make him sick,’ said Goossens. In a gesture of disgust, Ecclestone finally threw down his cards, before announcing: ‘Here is a guy who understands nothing about motor racing. He’s lucky enough to pick Fittipaldi, who will probably win the World Championship [he did], and he’s just been lucky enough to win in Brazil. Now he’s lucky enough to beat the hell out of me at gin rummy. I suppose if I put a Texaco sticker on my car, I will win the race.’ Goossens laughed, and the two men parted company.

  The next morning Goossens was stopped by two journalists who asked if it was true what Ecclestone had just told them. What did he say? asked Goossens. ‘He said he lost so much money playing you at gin rummy that he couldn’t afford to pay you and you forced him to put a Texaco sticker on the Brabham car.’ Disbelieving what he’d been told, Goossens rushed to the Brabham pit to see a large Texaco sticker on the front of the car to be driven by Reutemann. He protested in vain to Ecclestone that he mustn’t do it, that Texaco had a monopoly contract with McLaren. Why not? countered Ecclestone. It wasn’t illegal. ‘In any garage in the UK, you can pick up a Texaco sticker and put it your car,’ he added, and refused to have the sticker removed. It was a race which, with one car after another breaking down, Reutemann, of course, won. News of the win, with photographs of the winning car, featured on a number of sports pages – and soon afterwards Goossens was summoned to the company’s headquarters in America. The newspaper photographs seemed to confirm what they had heard. Was it true, his bosses wanted to know, that he had pressured Ecclestone into putting the Texaco sticker on Reutemann’s car in lieu of a gin rummy debt that Ecclestone couldn’t afford to meet? An abashed Goossens, with hand on heart, assured them that he hadn’t, and explained that it had simply been Ecclestone’s way of getting his own back.

  The South African Grand Prix win was a first for the moody 32-year-old Reutemann, who ended the season by also winning the Austrian Grand Prix and the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen. Formula One commentators began talking about the renaissance of Brabham, although predictions of the team’s emergence as a World Championship force were somewhat premature.

  Although Reutemann finished third in the 1975 World Championship and Brabham second in the Constructors’ Championship, his relationship with Ecclestone deteriorated sharply after a dispute over his retainer. Ecclestone declined to pay the kind of money the Argentinian thought he was worth. Like Enzo Ferrari – ‘I take a driver that no one wants to sign and in three races he can win a Grand Prix … it is my car that wins’1 – Ecclestone believed it was the car, not the driver, which won races. Reutemann signed with Ferrari – he had to pay Ecclestone $100,000 for breaking his contract – which briefly propelled Ulsterman John Watson, who had joined Brabham in 1973, to the number-one slot. But the Brabham team would soon tragically lose its second driver, the promising Brazilian Carlos Pace, who had arrived at Brabham the previous season sponsored by a Brazilian coffee company. On 18 March 1977, two weeks after the South African Grand Prix, in which he came thirteenth, he died in a flying accident.

  Ecclestone, realising that Watson, who won five Grands Prix in 154 appearances during a 12-year career and whose best year would be a joint second in 1982, was unlikely to bring Brabham the World Championship title, began talking to Niki Lauda, the 1975 world champion, who had joined Ferrari in 1974 under newly appointed team boss, Luca di Montezemolo, to take the Scuderia to renewed success. In August 1977 the 28-year-old Austrian, on his way to winning his second championship title, flew to London the week before the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort for a secret meeting with Ecclestone, who was keen to sign him for the following season. Ecclestone was also keen on a sponsorship deal that Lauda believed he could bring with him.

  The company was Parmalat, the Italian dairy farm conglomerate, which at the time was seriously considering sponsoring the Brazilian driver Emerson Fittipaldi, in whose country it had recently opened a new factory. Lauda introduced Ecclestone to senior executives at Parmalat, which led to a series of meetings to discuss a proposal that, as part of a sponsorship agreement, would have Ecclestone overseeing a marketing operation in England to which he would commit his expertise. In return, Parmalat would pay $500,000 to cover a penalty payment for Lauda’s defection from Ferrari, and also make up the deficit in the annual retainer that Ecclestone would be paying Lauda, which was considerably less than the £200,000 on offer from Ferrari. Parmalat agreed and began to wind down its sponsorship commitments elsewhere to meet the costs.

  Lauda’s defection from Ferrari caused uproar among Italy’s tifosi. Not only had he rejected a personal invitation from the venerated Enzo Ferrari himself, but Lauda, in a media interview, was less than complimentary about the Ferrari team. Heroically in the circumstances, he turned up at a test session prior to the Italian Grand Prix at Monza the weekend after his outburst. He was greeted by a hail of potatoes and tomatoes thrown into the Ferrari pits by a large and angry crowd. Ecclestone, though, was a happy man. Within a short time Parmalat was paying most of Brabham’s $10-million annual budget. How pleased Parmalat was has proved more difficult to gauge.

  In July 1978 a company called Parmalat UK Ltd was formed and Ecclestone was appointed its sole director, with its registered offices at 14–16 Great Portland Street, London W1, the address given for many of the 17 Formula One-related companies which in later years he would set up. But, on the evidence of the company’s annual accounts, it seems he did little indeed to advance Parmalat’s marketing interests: it failed to trade and remains a dormant company to this day. A central figure in this partnership was public-relations consultant Gianni Scarica. He declined to discuss the UK operation. It was, he said through an interpreter, ‘delicate and confidential’. Further questions were referred to the office of Parmalat’s General Director, Domenico Barili, in Italy, who said: ‘I can only tell you that this company was formed with the view of running a possible Parmalat business in the UK market. It is still a dormant company because we did not have the opportunity to use it, but the friendship which binds Mr Ecclestone and Parmalat is still very strong.’

  Lauda remained with Brabham for less than two years in a relationship that disappointed all expectations. Although he finished fourth in the 1978 World Championship table, the following year he plummeted to fourteenth, and, long before the Italian Grand Prix, where he recorded his best result of the season by coming fourth, he was making it known at the circuits that he would be leaving Brabham at the end of the season. It was due, he said, to a loss of motivation – ‘I don’t want to drive in circles any more’ – and his dissatisfaction with the Brabham cars, which he described as ‘totally uncompetitive’.2 Ecclestone responded by offering three-times world champion Jackie Stewart, 40, who had retired six years earlier, $2.5 million if he signed for Brabham for one season. Lauda described the offer, which Stewart declined to accept, as ‘a joke’, while others saw it as a ruse by Ecclestone to create a headline and wind up Lauda. If so, it worked on both counts.

  Backed by Parmalat and Marlboro, Lauda changed his mind when Ecclestone offered him $2 million for the season. He was also influenced by Ecclestone’s decision to move from the Alfa Romeo 12-cylinder engine to the Ford Cosworth DFV V8. Nevertheless, Lauda remained deeply unsettled. A few days after signing new terms for the following season, he suddenly got
out of his car during the practice session at the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, the penultimate race of the season, to tell a stunned Ecclestone that he was quitting for good, explaining he could no longer race simply for the money. ‘I told him I had had enough and wanted to do different things in my life … that I couldn’t drive any more … that I didn’t want to.’3 Ecclestone, he reported, understood his decision perfectly and wished him well, an attitude that for the hard-nosed Ecclestone, given the money he was investing in the new Cosworth-powered car, bordered on the saintly.

  Shortly after breaking the news to Ecclestone, Lauda, whose ailing business fortunes would compel him to return to Formula One three years later, in 1984, to win his third World Championship, bumped into Alistair Caldwell, former team manager of McLaren, as he walked through the lobby of his Montreal hotel. He told Caldwell about his decision and his reason. Caldwell was more than usually interested. He had just agreed to join Brabham as development engineer to give the team’s performance greater consistency, a factor behind Lauda’s earlier criticism.

  Caldwell says he had no illusions about working for Ecclestone, whose abrasive management style was well known. ‘I made it clear when I went to work for him that he would only shout at me once, which would be the day I left,’ said the man who had his own reputation for wanting things done his way. It had led to his departure from McLaren, which he had joined as a junior mechanic in 1967 after arriving in England from New Zealand, and where, five years later, he became team manager. After guiding McLaren to World Championship titles in 1974 and 1976, and runners-up in 1975 and 1977, he had a serious difference of opinion with team co-founder Teddy Mayer after the team began to deteriorate in the 1978 season. Caldwell, who wanted the team to adopt a change of tactics, made the conflict a resigning issue, and lost the day.

  He went to Brabham because of his admiration for Gordon Murray. He believed that with Murray’s design skills and his experience the team could achieve what he believed they had always lacked – consistency. ‘They always suffered from a philosophy of trying to win races instead of championships,’ he said. ‘Jack Brabham lost sight of that, and it didn’t change when Bernie took over. Look at Keke Rosberg – he became world champion in 1982, and he won only one Grand Prix. Reliability has to predominate over winning races.’ One of the Brabham team’s major faults, added Caldwell, had been that their cars had lacked that reliability. ‘I wanted to introduce some of the disciplines that had been an essential part of McLaren’s success, such as records on basic things like engine failure or modifications, just quality control, really, which was all part of helping to keep the cars reliable.’

  In 1980, Caldwell’s first full year with Brabham, 28-year-old Brazilian Nélson Piquet, a Formula Three champion who had joined Brabham in 1978 to team up with Niki Lauda, came second to Williams’s Alan Jones – the closest the Brabham team had come to producing a world champion since Ecclestone had taken over – but the relationship between Caldwell and Ecclestone was beginning to live up to its stormy expectations. ‘There was constant tension,’ said Caldwell. ‘Bernie ran a very, very unhappy ship. He thrived on aggravation, he thrived on fear. The whole place was always worried about Bernie. If a mechanic was found somewhere he shouldn’t have been, he’d be sacked. Tea-making equipment was banned because stopping for tea meant stopping work.’ Caldwell claims his clashes with Ecclestone, at least inside the factory, were invariably caused by his response to his employer’s frugal habits.

  ‘The lighting in the factory was so bad that the mechanics, when working under a car, had to use hand torches, for which, by the way, they had to buy the batteries. Without consulting Bernie, I commissioned the installation of more powerful fluorescent strip lighting which was much lower to the ground and made the mechanics’ work easier. When he saw what I had done, he went epileptic with rage because of the cost. He would also come into the drawing office, where I might be with Gordon, and he’d turn off the lights, which made it very difficult for the draughtsmen to see. I would immediately switch them back on again, which was the sort of thing that added to the friction. I think he couldn’t cope with me because I was the only one there who wasn’t frightened of him.’

  But Caldwell’s clashes with Ecclestone on the track were more serious. The first occurred at the 1979 Canadian Grand Prix shortly after his arrival, when it was decided not to change engines in the spare car prior to the race. During the race the engine blew while Piquet held a commanding lead. It led to a major row between the two men, which almost equalled the fracas at the Brazilian Grand Prix in 1981, when Caldwell went against Ecclestone’s instructions and agreed with Piquet that he should stay with dry tyres. A sudden downpour as the track was drying in unpredictable weather saw Piquet, who started in pole position, finish twelfth. They parted company a couple of months later after a public row at the Monaco Grand Prix – ‘I really can’t remember what sparked it off’ – when Piquet, again on pole position, finished ninth. ‘Yes, Bernie sacked me, but I had no problem with that. He sacked me before I could quit. I said I would the day he shouted at me.’

  Their parting was made all the more bitter by of a dispute over a bonus which Caldwell claimed was overdue. Ecclestone, he said, refused to pay him, alleging that he had probably already received his bonus by way of backhanders from one of three engine builders to whom Caldwell gave the Brabham business. Said Caldwell: ‘I went to three different companies to play one off the other, to get the best engine and the best service. It seemed Bernie thought I was doing it to get a bribe from them. The thought had never entered my head. They didn’t even used to give me a Christmas card, and I used to give them millions of pounds [in business].’ That season Piquet went on to win the World Championship, due, insists Caldwell, to his efforts. Following a brief spell with the ATS team, he quit the world of motor sport for good to set up a successful storage rental business.

  Gordon Murray, one of Formula One’s most creative designers, was left smarting by Lauda’s reference to Brabham’s ‘totally uncompetitive’ cars. He had been referring to the BT48, introduced in 1979, his final season with Brabham, and powered by Alfa Romeo’s 3-litre 12-cylinder engine, which hit a series of problems from the fuel system and gearbox to a water leak and brakes. It was proving a testing time for Murray, whose ingenious efforts the previous season, with the BT46 and BT46B, had also come a cropper, although with problems of design rather than engineering.

  The BT46, which first appeared at the South African Grand Prix, incorporated a surface-cooling system intended to replace radiators and therefore radically reduce aerodynamic drag. Water and oil was cooled by passing through a double-skinned channel which formed the outer skin of the chassis – the same principle as the conventional radiator but spread over a much larger area. Unfortunately, the technology wasn’t available to provide the degree of oil cooling the engine required. With minimal drag, it proved exceptionally fast but boiled like a kettle by the end of a lap. Critics claimed it would have worked – if the car had had the surface area of a London Transport double-decker bus. Murray’s tongue-in-cheek reply was that it did have that surface area – if the surface fin convulations were unravelled. The BT46 survived until the Spanish Grand Prix, to be replaced at the next race – the Swedish Grand Prix – by the more controversial BT46B, whose design caused a confrontation between Ecclestone and the other teams of such hostility that it threatened the unity of the F1CA (which, incidentally, that year – 1978– changed its name to the Formula One Constructors’ Association (FOCA), when it was somewhat belatedly realised that ‘F1CA’ was similar to an Italian expletive).

  The BT46B was Murray’s answer to Colin Chapman’s revolutionary ‘ground effect’ Lotus 78, whose underside was designed to form a venturi ‘throat’ while ceramic and polypropylene strips – or ‘skirts’ – were fitted along the sides of the car, brushing the track to ‘force’ air underneath and increase air pressure and downforce to give greater suction and thus cornering speeds. Launched in 1977,
it was replaced the following season by the sleeker Lotus 79, in which Mario Andretti won the World Championship and Lotus the Constructors’ Championship. It became the new technology that all the other teams strove to match. Unable to copy the Lotus 79 because the configuration of the wide Alfa Romeo 3-litre B12 engine used by Brabham prevented a venturi crucial to creating the same degree of downforce, Murray came up with a car similar in effect to the Chaparral ‘sucker’ car that Texan Jim Hall had pioneered in CanAm racing eight years earlier.

  The fundamental difference was that Hall had used a secondary motor to create suction, while Murray used a fan at the rear of the car geared to engine speed, but it achieved the same result: a tremendous downforce and a much faster cornering speed. Such was the secrecy used to protect the BT46B from prying eyes, which Ecclestone and Murray were convinced was a world-beater, that in the pits at Anderstorp, where Niki Lauda notched up a brilliant victory, the fan was hidden from view with a dustbin lid-like cover. But the other teams – led by Colin Chapman, Ken Tyrrell, Frank Williams, John Surtees and Teddy Mayer – claimed that the fan, clearly intended to improve the car’s aerodynamics, was movable, contrary to FIA rules. Not so, argued Ecclestone and Murray. In sucking air from beneath the car, which then passed through a rear water radiator mounted horizontally on top of the engine, the fan was a legitimate cooling aid and, as such, came within the FIA rules.

  The teams remained unconvinced and demanded official clarification: was the fan a movable aerodynamic device or not? Ecclestone made his position clear. The teams would attempt to block the BT46B at their peril. He warned that he would go to law ‘if we suffer any financial loss from anyone who tries to stop us [from racing the car]’.4 The clash became all the more acrimonious when some drivers claimed that the fan was dangerous. It sucked stones and grit off the track and spat them out at cars behind, they claimed. But that allegation, said Murray, was inspired by Colin Chapman, who was said to have seen the Brabham car as a serious threat to the Lotus 78.