by Terry Lovell
Said Murray: ‘One of Chapman’s drivers lobbied all the drivers. Some of them went along with him because their team bosses said they should, and others came to me and Bernie and said they were not going to say that because it was bullshit. The fan couldn’t spit anything out at the back because the fan e-flux [exit speed] at maximum speed was only 55mph. Besides, the radial fan would have sent any stones flying sideways.’ John Watson, supporting Murray’s claims, said the drivers’ objections ‘perpetrated the lie. They were doing it to protect their competitive position.’ At one stage Chapman, who reckoned development of the principle would see drivers wearing ‘G-suits’ to counter the gravity load, threatened to produce a twin-fan car – one for each venturi – but decided against it ‘in the better interests of racing’.
The opposition mounted against Ecclestone became so intense that his role within the FOCA itself was threatened. Chapman and other leading team bosses made it clear that unless he withdrew the BT46B he could forget about representing the constructors. This, they knew, was Ecclestone’s Achilles heel and were ready to exploit it. Ecclestone went to Murray to explain his predicament, adding that he was going to propose a compromise solution, which would allow the car to run for another three races for the championship points before being withdrawn to ‘keep the constructors happy’. Murray was incensed, firmly convinced that his adapted-Chaparral design would win the Constructors’ Championship. Ecclestone, he added, was of the same opinion, but stressed the importance of building up the FOCA to make it stronger. Murray, a car designer, not a politician, was not mollified; months of hard work, and the team’s hopes of major honours, were about to go down the drain through political expediency.
At a meeting of the FOCA, Ecclestone duly agreed to shelve the BT46B. A statement subsequently issued by the FOCA said that while certain aspects of the fan might not have complied with FIA regulations, members foresaw ‘further developments of the principle resulting in cornering speeds of such magnitude that existing circuit safety precautions may be rendered ineffective’. A new rule would be drafted by the FOCA in collaboration with the technical sub-committee of the Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI) to outlaw the relevant aspects of the design. Its introduction was to be delayed to allow it to compete in the next three Grands Prix. The CSI, however, stepped in to insist that if it was agreed that some aspects of the design might be illegal then it had to banned forthwith. The BT46B never raced again, while Lotus went on to take the Constructors’ Championship and Mario Andretti, Chapman’s lead driver, the World Championship. The decision to kill his design was all the more exasperating to Murray. He claimed that subsequent airflow measurement tests carried out by the CSI had proved that the primary purpose of the fan was as a cooling aid. ‘I felt sick,’ he added. But the Brabham team had some comfort at the next race, the French Grand Prix, when John Watson took pole position in a conventional car. Said Watson: ‘That was one of the sweetest moments of my Grand Prix career. It was sticking two fingers up at all the other teams who had been upset at what Brabham had done.’ Murray believed Ecclestone took the ban hard. ‘I think it might have been worse for him than it was for me, because he loved getting the cars on pole position and bringing them in and putting the covers over them. He loved it.’
It was a brief but acrimonious episode that revealed the intensity of the competition that existed between the constructors and also how far they were prepared to go to nullify another team’s edge, even to the detriment of the FOCA, whose cohesion of will and purpose under Ecclestone’s leadership had, in the space of a few short years, made it the most powerful single force in Formula One. It also illustrated the importance to Ecclestone of his position as the constructors’ deal-maker, even at the estimated cost of the £500,000 (about $1.625 million) it took to build the BT46B and a serious chance of winning the constructors’ title. Much more important, because to the pragmatic Ecclestone tomorrow was always another day, and the financial rewards that he fully anticipated were dependent on the power invested in him by the constructors.
Ecclestone would not have been surprised by the opposition of Chapman and his fellow constructors. While the FOCA stood as one against the outside world, its members were prepared to pursue all means fair or foul to protect or promote their own interests. Then, as now, fortunes were spent on finding new ways of shaving hundredths of a second off the speed of a car as designers dreamt of discovering some new aerodynamic or engineering concept. Murray’s BT46B wasn’t a time for quiet professional admiration, but for official protest to keep it off the track, unless, that is, it could be easily copied. That was the guiding principle: if it was possible to copy, it was legal; if it wasn’t, it wasn’t legal.
In addition to the ‘fan’ car fracas, 1978 was notable for two further reasons. The first was in the formalisation of Ecclestone’s leadership role within the FOCA, along with the arrival of Max Mosley in an influential role that would ultimately lead to his presidency of the FIA. The second was a company set up by Ecclestone that would deprive European governments of substantial sums of sales-tax revenue.
In the first instance, Ecclestone was given the title of President of Administration and Chief Executive of the FOCA, while at the same time the group’s General Purposes Committee, which consisted of Ecclestone, Mosley and Teddy Mayer, a co-founder of McLaren, was dissolved and the duties of Peter Macintosh, as secretary, brought to an end. One of Ecclestone’s first duties was to make an appointment of his own – that of Max Mosley, as the FOCA’s legal adviser. He was keen to retain the services of Mosley, who, bored and looking for new challenges, had sold his interests in the March team a year earlier. (The team’s assets were subsequently bought by German self-made millionaire Hans Gunther Schmidt for his ATS team.)
The urbane 37-year-old Max Mosley, silver-tongued in more than one language, had established his worth in helping to draft the contracts between the constructors and the organisers, as well as taking an advisory role in the negotiations themselves. He had also been at Ecclestone’s side during the skirmishes with Treu, Ugueux and Duffeler. Mosley had known Ecclestone from his first days as the owner of the Brabham team and had come to admire his business acumen. ‘Here was a guy who knew how many beans made five,’ Mosley observed. Ecclestone, in return, respected Mosley’s political and legal brain.
Certainly the two could not have been more dissimilar in manner or mien. Mosley was an épée to Ecclestone’s cutlass, privileged upbringing to working-class survival, intellect and subtlety to visceral logic and ruthlessness, charm and good looks to bluntness and rough-hewn features; qualities that complemented each other. Mosley believed they got on well together because they were, as he put it many years later, ‘both outsiders’. Ecclestone was an ‘outsider’ because the one-time second-hand-car dealer possessed the neither the social graces nor the professional qualities preferred by the FIA establishment; Mosley because of the legacy of his father’s name, a burden which dissuaded him from pursuing a full-time career as a Conservative politician.
He was the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the 1930s British Fascist leader, and socialite beauty Diana Mitford, who had the unique distinction of being on good terms with both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. (Baron Fritz Huschke von Hanstein, the former SS colonel, first greeted Mosley with the words: ‘It is good to meet the son of an old Nazi.’) Mosley’s political rallies, which sparked riots in the streets, led to their imprisonment in 1940 under Regulation 18b of the Emergency Powers Act, an internment law invoked ‘in the interests of public safety or defence of the realm’. The domestic turmoil caused the young Mosley to spend much of his early life in France and Germany before entering Christ Church, Oxford, to study law and physics and, in 1961, become secretary of the Oxford Union Society. He graduated with a BA in Natural Sciences, but embarked upon a legal career, specialising in patent and trademark law, after serving a pupillage in the chambers of Quintin Hogg, then a QC and later Lord Chancellor, head of the British judicial system.
> At the age of 21, he developed an interest in motor sport and his weekend social life was often spent at Silverstone, a welcome diversion from his law books. He took part in club racing before buying a Brabham and moving on to Formula Two, his first race, at the age of 28, taking place at Hockenheim in the Deutschland Trophy, alongside the ranks of Graham Hill, Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Jim Clark, an event which was marked by the death of Clark. In a two-heat race, Mosley finished a creditable tenth in a field of 18 cars. But, a year later, he had a lucky escape at Nurburgring, when the front wishbone of his Lotus dropped off and jammed the front-left wheel, causing the car to career off the track to leave him shaken but unhurt in an adjacent caravan park. It brought an end to a fancied career as a driver but not to his ambitions in motor sport. He took his legal expertise into management to become a director of March Engineering, set up in 1969 with Graham Coaker, who founded the company, Robin Herd and Alan Rees, each contributing £2500 to fund start-up capital of £10,000. Working out of a small rented workshop in Bicester, Oxfordshire, the following year the March racing team caused a minor sensation.
The season began at the South African Grand Prix with Jackie Stewart, signed that year by new arrival Ken Tyrrell, on pole position in a March 701, with one of March’s drivers, New Zealander Chris Amon, next to pole. During that season there was as many as six 701s on the grid – two works; two for Tyrrell, who, in the meantime, was building his own car for its debut that season in the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen; one for the STP Corporation; and one for Colin Crabbe Racing. They also built a car for Hubert Hahne for the German Grand Prix, but it failed to qualify, and, for the 1971 season, one for Rhodesian businessman John Love. That season was also noted for the arrival of a 22-year-old driver called Niki Lauda, who joined March in time for the Austrian Grand Prix after graduating through Formula Two, which had cost him £40,000 in paid-for rides. At the end of the 1972 season he moved on to the BRM team.
Despite its promising start, the March team, in common with most of its rivals, was living on a financial knife-edge. One respected Formula One journalist, apparently unable to elicit any information from Mosley or his colleagues about its sponsors, concluded in his magazine column that March stood for Much Advertised Racing Car Hoax. March was, in fact, an acronym for Mosley, Alan Rees, Coaker and Herd, but the company became so strapped for cash that Mosley’s half-brother, the Hon Jonathan Guinness, a director of the brewery company and later to become Lord Moyne, arranged for a £20,000 loan to be made to March Engineering by an investment company called Woodglen Ltd, of which he and his wife, Suzanne, were sole directors.
During these days the closeness of Mosley’s association with Ecclestone had been well noted within the Formula One brotherhood. It would be to Mosley that people would often take their grievances and entreaties, to be reassured that he would ‘talk to Bernie about it’. It is most probable that Ecclestone’s interest in Mosley had greater strategic depth than the FOCA’s need of a legal counsel, as necessary as this no doubt was in the new role of authority the constructors were taking upon themselves. Rather, Ecclestone, always one to plan three moves ahead, saw in Mosley the necessary diplomatic and political skills that made him perfectly suited to the establishment of the FIA, an influential seating that could certainly do no harm to his ambitions.
Indeed, with his new role as the constructors’ legal adviser barely in place, Mosley was ready in 1977, with Ecclestone’s keen support, to accept the nomination of British and some Scandinavian manufacturers for membership of the FIA’s Bureau Permanent International de Constructeurs d’Automobiles – the forerunner of the Manufacturers’ Commission – an influential committee responsible for technical, sporting, rally and off-road sub-commissions, and which would have given Mosley access to the FIA establishment’s corridors of power. His nomination was successfully opposed by the French, German and Italian manufacturers, who did not wish to share their table with an Englishman, and particularly one so close to Ecclestone. In the political circumstances, it was probably an attempt based more on hope than confidence. But nothing was lost. And Mosley’s time would come.
As a postscript to these confrontational and splenetic days, the FOCA announced a further appointment around this time, which was made not without a touch of the mischievous humour that Ecclestone relished. A title was created to make Enzo Ferrari the FOCA’s President of Sport, a purely honorific office giving him the responsibility of emphasising the sporting dimension of Formula One. The problem was, he had complained to Ecclestone at a meeting attended by Mosley and Marco Piccinini, he talked too much about business. It was not good for the Formula One image. ‘Don’t keep talking about money, talk about the sport,’ he advised Ecclestone. ‘After all, if you are going to run a brothel, you wouldn’t put a big sign saying “Brothel”. You would put a sign saying “Hotel” and run the brothel in the basement.’ So it came to pass that the mighty boss of Ferrari was appointed by Ecclestone to promote the hotel.
The seething political turbulence of the second half of the seventies continued unabated, with Ecclestone emerging as the most powerful single voice in Formula One. Now an established team owner, he had become widely respected as a shrewd and skilful operator, even by those who had suffered at his hands. So when he announced in 1977 the launch of a new company – International Race Tire Services Ltd (IRTS) – to exclusively market and distribute Goodyear competition tyres to all formulae, excluding Formula One, in Europe, Asia and South America, its success was considered assured. And, briefly, it was. But its profits were in part achieved illegally.
The formation of IRTS followed discussions between Ecclestone and Leo Mehl, Goodyear’s worldwide director of racing, who would know nothing of the manner in which his company’s tyres were to be sold. The agreement was straightforward: Goodyear would supply the tyres and IRTS would market and sell them. A principal figure in the company was Jean-François Mosnier, who had been involved in racing since the mid-sixties. He had worked for Ligier, Cooper and Brabham, and in 1969 joined Firestone to oversee its Formula One activities. He became a director of Ecclestone’s Motor Racing Developments (International) Ltd in December 1975, which was formed in February 1971 as a company specialising in marketing and promotions before changing its name to International Race Tire Services Ltd, of which he was appointed managing director. Recruited to organise the transport and fitting of the tyres was Keith Greene, the former Brabham team manager who had quit following a dispute with Ecclestone over pay.
Under Ecclestone’s direction business boomed and the company, which began with a few pens at Heathrow, soon had to move to a 25,000-square-foot warehouse and offices at Uxbridge, Middlesex, where, incidentally, the FOCA’s administration office was briefly based. With a set of tyres for a Formula Two car costing as much as £800, it proved a highly lucrative business. But with some teams, those who did not have an agreement with Goodyear, IRTS imposed a strict cash-only policy. It removed all evidence of a sale – and the legal obligation to pay VAT (Value Added Tax) in the country where the trade took place. It was a part of Greene’s role to collect the cash and smuggle the money out of the country and safely into the UK. After 12 months, Greene, becoming aware that it might be illegal, became tired of being ‘just a money collector’ and resigned. ‘Once it’d [the company] been set up, all I did was collect money for it. I told Bernie I couldn’t go on just doing that,’ said Greene, who later became team manager of Nissan’s new UK-based World Championship sports car team.
Greene was replaced by Nick Parkes, a Formula Two tyre engineer for Goodyear, who later became competitions secretary of the British Racing Drivers’ Club and a member of the organisers’ committee of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. He explained how the sale of the tyres was ingeniously concealed to dupe Customs officials at border checks: ‘You go out with 500 sets of tyres, you come back with 500 sets of tyres, because what happened was … the old tyres would come off [the cars] and you’d put them back on the truck. As long as you
r documentation showed that you went out with 500 tyres and came back with 500 tyres, nobody worried.’ With VAT payable in the countries in which the tyres were sold, and for which IRTS should have been registered for trading purposes, ‘the … people who lost out were the VAT men in Germany, Belgium, France, Italy or wherever’. And, it seems, the Inland Revenue in England.
Like Greene, Parkes found himself responsible for the safe return to England of thousands of pounds of cash in various currencies. At the end of an event, ‘you would have all this money, and you had to do something with it,’ he said. ‘The usual practice was to put it in a suitcase and just walk through Customs or drive back with it in the boot of a car.’ In some countries, though, because of the number of Customs checks involved in the return to England, a different method was deployed to minimise the risk. ‘You would have to go to a certain bank and deposit it and they’d give you a receipt and you’d get on the plane, fly back and … by the following Thursday the money would appear in a bank in England. It would be transferred via Switzerland or wherever.’
International Race Tire Services Ltd enjoyed rapid growth and profits. In the first year its export business turnover totalled £148,720, with net profits of £19,954 – three years later the figures were £503,268 and £254,889 respectively. But the company did not prosper for long. By late 1980, when net profits peaked at £456,858, Goodyear, exasperated by yet another power battle which broke out at the Spanish Grand Prix, temporarily withdrew from Formula One due to the constant hostilities between the FOCA and the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FISA), which by then had succeeded the Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI) as the FIA’s motor sport governing authority. Within a few months Ecclestone and Mosnier were announcing a new partnership with Avon Tyres, who had dominated formula Ford racing in the seventies with a cross-ply tyre.