by Terry Lovell
At its launch in January 1981, attended by team bosses Ken Tyrrell, Frank Williams, Peter Warr, Eric Broadley of Lola, and Morris Nunn of Ensign, who were curious to see what kind of tyres Ecclestone would be selling, along with specialised, ex-Firestone racing equipment, Mosnier made it clear the company was neither a promoter nor a sponsor – it was strictly a commercial operation. Mosnier declined to say how much their tyres would cost or name ‘the two or three teams’ who, he said, would be using Avon Tyres that season. They turned out to be down-the-grid teams ATS, Ensign and Theodore. But even at the launch of the new partnership things were not quite what they seemed. The radial tyre unveiled was not from Avon but Goodyear – the Goodyear name had been burnt off and the Avon name painted on. Goodyear had sold its moulds and equipment to Avon, which used them for its own programme.
International Race Tire Services could not repeat the success it had enjoyed with Goodyear. By April 1983, unable to compete with Michelin, Pirelli and Goodyear, who had now moved back into Formula One, it ceased trading, with losses of £34,242. Leo Mehl, after more than 30 years with Goodyear, retired in March 1996 to become executive director of the Indy Racing League from January 1997 until the end of 1999, still unaware of the activities of International Race Tire Services Ltd. In November 1992 Mosnier, who a month earlier had announced the launch of Bravo Formula 1, a team backed by the Spanish government, died in a hospital in Nice at the age of 46.
He was the one person, says Ecclestone, able to comment on the allegations made by Greene and Parkes. ‘Jean ran that business for me. He did whatever had to be done. If there was money coming in or money going out, he did everything. He was 100 per cent in charge. He was a trustworthy guy. You should ask them if it was me they were bringing bundles of cash to. I never saw any cash from them. I think this is shit. If they paid it into a bank in Italy, no way the bank could transfer from there to here or anywhere else. The worst thing you could do is go to a bank in Italy and transfer to Switzerland. They would probably lock you up on the spot for mentioning Switzerland for a start. And if they [Greene and Parkes] did it, then we should inform the police in Italy, because they are criminals.’
By the time of the launch of International Race Tire Services, Ecclestone had sold his palatial pile in Farnborough Park, Kent, and, with his girlfriend Dora Tuana Tan, had moved into a sumptuous penthouse apartment, then said to be worth £500,000, in Alembic House on the Albert Embankment, whose 25-foot-high plate-glass windows commanded a panoramic view across the Thames to the House of Commons and the Tate Gallery. He had the apartment – he later sold it to author and politician Jeffrey Archer – refurbished to his expensive and exacting tastes. Hand-made Italian furniture, Modigliani paintings, his world-class collection of netsukes – Japanese finely carved miniature sculptures – created a setting described as ‘an unsettling blend of the exotic and the austere’ without any sign of ‘the common debris of human occupation’.
Its eclectic and sanitised ambience accurately reflected the artistic and quirky in Ecclestone’s forceful personality. As with all things in his life, it had to be precisely to his taste. He appeared to be particularly fastidious over the carpet, which he wanted in a particular shade of blue. He was supplied with a range of samples, from which he made a selection, and placed an order. Due to the difficulty in getting the carpet to the penthouse, a crane was hired to lift it, along with other crated items of furniture, and then guided through the balcony window. But, once it was delivered, he was far from pleased with his choice: it had to go. Having managed to sell it on, he phoned the Brabham works, inquired how many mechanics were there, and ordered six to be sent immediately to his penthouse. He instructed them to roll the carpet up and, with the area below cleared, throw it out of the window. ‘I didn’t need to hire a crane for that, although I suppose it could have ended up in the River Thames,’ he said.
He was equally decisive in protecting the parking space exclusively reserved for his apartment. Driving a German-registered Mercedes 500SEL, he made a detour to his home while en route, with Murray and Caldwell, from Chessington, Surrey, to Silverstone for a test session. He arrived to find the driver of a brand-new Jaguar XJ6 pulling into his space. Ecclestone pointed out the mistake, to which the errant motorist replied that he wouldn’t be a moment, before disappearing into the building. Ecclestone imposed his own solution. He put his foot on the accelerator of the Mercedes and rammed the rear of the Jaguar, causing it to spin round and collide side on with a wall.
Murray and Caldwell remained in the car while Ecclestone calmly went to his penthouse, collected a briefcase and returned to find a stunned driver examining his somewhat damged car. Said Caldwell: ‘Bernie simply got into his car and we drove off. The Jaguar was basically a write-off. The rear wheel had been stoved in and badly damaged down the side where it had been rammed into the wall.’ Ecclestone strongly disputed that the incident, confirmed by Murray, ever took place. ‘I can’t imagine why I would do a detour from Chessington to Silverstone via London, and I can’t ever remember ever going to a test session at Silverstone. In fact, during the whole time I had Brabham, I think I went to about four test sessions in my life. So that’s all shit.’ All the same, it seems that his driving manners did leave a lot to be desired. In another incident, he was responsible for colliding with a car at a roundabout. Before getting out of his car to confront the innocent motorist, Ecclestone, according to his passenger, said: ‘Don’t forget – it was his fault.’
By 1977, with the 6000 square feet of offices and works at New Haw, near Weybridge, proving inadequate for the 40 employees now working on the Brabham cars, Ecclestone moved Motor Racing Developments Ltd a few miles to a 28,000-square-foot factory, with an adjoining office complex, on an industrial estate in Chessington, Surrey. The move was also precipitated by the need to accommodate a relatively new but already expanding venture that would be the foundation of Ecclestone’s future riches. It was in the basement of the offices, known as ‘the dungeons’, that FOCA TV, the seed from which his digital television empire would grow, was launched.
But the move had hardly been completed before Ecclestone sent out the clear signal that if the premises of Motor Racing Developments had changed, the management ethos hadn’t. He ordered the windows of a toilet block to be boarded up to plunge it into total darkness. He then had a time-switch fitted which was programmed to automatically turn off the lights after two minutes. ‘It was to prevent us from sitting on the loo reading a newspaper in his time,’ said a former employee. When Ecclestone learnt that the mechanics were able to delay the time-switch with ease, he began to make random visits first thing in the morning to check its setting.
The move to larger premises was a cause of joy to Gordon Murray. There was now space for something for which he yearned – a full-scale wind tunnel. ‘Our wind tunnel,’ he said, ‘was wetting your finger and sticking it in the air. We didn’t spend hardly any money on testing. You just built the car, it worked and you went racing.’ But Murray soon found he had a battle on his hands. Ecclestone gave him short shrift when he learned that the estimated cost of its construction was $6 million. Murray persisted until Ecclestone finally relented – on condition that he supplied the labour and material through his business channels and Murray took on the work of its design, technical specifications and overall construction. Even on those conditions, it was an offer Murray couldn’t refuse.
Similar economies enabled Brabham to be the first team to have its own carbon-fibre production facilities. Again on the grounds of costs, Ecclestone refused to put the work out to building contractors, but agreed to provide the labour and materials himself, while Murray oversaw the ‘in-house’ construction of small factory premises. He said: ‘Bernie never said no to whatever I wanted to do … except when it came to spending money.’
Notes
1. Autocar, 4 September 1982.
2. Daily Mail, 8 September 1979.
3. Autocar, 26 January 1980.
4. Autocar, 1
7 June 1978.
6
JEAN-MARIE BALESTRE: LE GRAND FROMAGE
The failure of the Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI), under the presidency of Pierre Ugueux, to check the advances of the FOCA bode ill for the Belgian. The regulatory body that had governed motor sport on behalf of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) for almost two decades had, in the space of a few years, been seriously degraded by the self-proclaimed authority of Bernie Ecclestone and the constructors.
Lord Hesketh, who ran the Hesketh team from 1973 until 1975 until it was closed down by financial pressures, believed the constructors became so effective so rapidly because of a bureaucratic FIA’s traditional attitudes. Said Hesketh: ‘They [the constructors] weren’t interested in the old hierarchy. The FIA wasn’t so much stuck in a time warp as a mindset. Essentially, they saw the English as being vulgar. That was the problem they had. But what they didn’t realise was that the English may have been vulgar, but actually it was the next generation. You could almost say that the F1CA took the running of Formula One by default. When they did it, they did a much better job.’ Hesketh’s own experience was an example of how the teams’ fortunes improved under Ecclestone’s militant negotiating skills. The Hesketh team ‘start’ money on its arrival in 1973 was negligible; two years later, when, during the second half of the season, it was second in the World Championship, it was £22,000 – in the days when a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow cost £11,000.
With the constructors virtually riding roughshod over the FIA’s authority, it had become patently clear that Ugueux was no match for Ecclestone. Prince Paul Metternich, the FIA’s president, and his mandarins realised that a more aggressive and cunning strategist than he would be required if the constructors were to be brought to heel. Standing in the wings, eager for his entrance, was the tall, burly frame of Frenchman Jean-Marie Balestre, a man who saw himself as the FIA’s saviour. In some respects he was not unlike Ecclestone: a self-made, egocentric and despotic figure described as fiery, erratic and intelligent. He also enjoyed being immaculately attired, occasionally appearing at Grands Prix in white suit and matching shoes.
Unlike Ecclestone, however, Balestre – born in 1921 in Saint-Rémy de Provence, near Marseilles, the son of a journalist who became secretary of the Socialist Party in Paris – came from more prosperous beginnings. During the war he fought with the French Resistance from 1 April 1942 until his arrest on 24 May 1944, which led to his appearance before a German military court and, he claimed in a biographical résumé which he supplied, a death sentence. However, he was ‘tortured and deported’ to a concentration camp, where, on 4 May 1945, he was freed by Allied troops.
In 1949, with the support of French media magnate, Robert Hersant, he founded a car magazine, L’Auto Journal, which marked the beginning of a highly successful publishing group and the making of his business fortune. A keen follower of motor sport, he helped to found in April 1952 the French motor sport organisation, the Fédération Française du Sport Automobile (FFSA), of which in 1968 he became secretary-general and then president for 23 years, until 1996. A logical step was his membership of the CSI, from where he observed at first hand the ineffectiveness of Ugueux’s efforts to halt the arrogant English constructors. And it was there that others observed his peculiar habit of appearing to be dozing, only to suddenly come to life with an incisive question. The message was clear: beware the sleeping bear.
By the middle of 1978, with Ugueux shortly due to stand for re-election, Balestre let it be known that he was ready to put his name forward for the post. There were, in fact, few willing to do so. Commenting on Balestre’s candidature, Fabrizio Serena, president of the Commissione Sportiva Automobilistica Italiana, Italy’s motor sport authority, said later: ‘Well, at the time, there was no really suitable alternative.’1 Balestre did so with the blessing and support of the powerful Hersant, who was no less keen to see control of Formula One returned to the headquarters of the FIA in Place de la Concorde, Paris. Hersant, as xenophobic as Balestre, believed that his business associate was the one man able to achieve that objective.
The election became very much a one-horse race after Ugueux decided to stand down. Why he did so remains uncertain. According to a former senior FIA official who was directly involved in the incident, Ugueux withdrew following pressure from Balestre over an incident at the Le Mans 24-Hour race in June 1978, less than four months before the election was due to take place. At the centre of it all was the design of a one-off car by Porsche, nicknamed ‘Moby Dick’ because of its size and shape. Concerned that it might infringe technical regulations, Porsche sought the guidance of two FIA technical representatives, who believed it conformed to the required specifications. However, French manufacturers protested to the FFSA’s Technical Commission that it was illegal. A representative was instructed to raise the issue at the next meeting of the CSI’s Technical Commission, shortly to be held in Madrid, where members declared the design of the ‘Moby Dick’ to be illegal. Porsche was informed accordingly, and that, it was thought, was the end of the ‘Moby Dick’ – until it arrived at Le Mans ready to compete.
The scrutineers at first refused it entry to the paddock, but were handed a letter by Porsche’s racing manager, which, signed by Ugueux, authorised its inclusion in the race. The matter was hurriedly referred by phone to Balestre, as president of the FFSA, the organisers of the event. Because approval had been given by Ugueux as president of the CSI, Balestre said nothing other than to issue an instruction that the Porsche racing manager must hand the letter over to a senior official and that it was to be passed on to him. The ‘Moby Dick’ was then allowed to compete. It seems that Ugueux agreed to write the letter of authorisation following a threat from Porsche that if the car was declared illegal, the company would withdraw from all sports-car racing for the rest of the season. As Porsche was a major entrant, this would have proved a serious blow, financially and prestigiously, to a motor sport at the height of its popularity. Ugueux was advised not to challenge the ultimatum, and, accordingly, permitted an illegal entry in direct violation of his own Technical Commission’s ruling. Shortly before the election, Ugueux was made aware that his letter was in Balestre’s possession, and that its contents, if made public, would prove highly embarrassing. ‘Ugueux was an honest man, an important and much respected man in his country … and he just made a mistake,’ said the former senior FIA official. ‘Balestre convinced him that he couldn’t be elected with these mistakes behind him.’
However, Ugueux, today a sprightly 88-year-old with 12 grandchildren, gives another account, claiming that the ‘Moby Dick’ incident had no bearing on his decision not to stand. While confirming that he had authorised the car’s illegal inclusion and that he had been warned that Balestre had a dossier on him, he denied that Balestre had used the incident to dissuade him from standing for re-election. He did so, he insisted, for family reasons. As a father of four children at university, he couldn’t afford to remain in what he described as ‘a position of poor remuneration’. He added that he was further influenced in his decision by Ecclestone, who had persuaded him that Formula One needed someone like Balestre to help continue the sport’s transformation.
Balestre’s vague comments do little to clear up the conflicting accounts. In a brief statement, he said no more than: ‘Because of the influence and complicity of one of Mr Ugueux’s Vice-Chairmen and his Technical Commission, Porsche flouted the rules and secured the homologation of an illegal car. Ecclestone was never involved in this matter [in that he had influenced Ugueux in his decision not to stand], and your entire story on this point is a fabrication.’
Ugueux’s decision to withdraw led to a two-horse race between Balestre and Tom Binford, the popular president of America’s national sporting authority, the Automobile Competition Committee for the United States (ACCUS). Binford was ranked an outsider runner, and a late one at that. It wasn’t until August, a little more than two months before the election was due to be held, t
hat he put his name forward, with the much-qualified support of colleagues who left unexpressed their doubts that the likeable Binford could win sufficient support within the membership of the European-based and politically dominated FIA. By then, Balestre, who, it is said, booked a Concorde flight to Brazil for a 40-minute airport meeting with leading officials of the Automóvel Club do Brasil, the country’s national motor sport authority, to ensure their support, was more or less home and dry. And so it proved to be, although Binford did better than most had expected.
In October 1978 Balestre was duly elected president of the CSI – and at the same time, at his insistence, the name of the Commission Sportive Internationale was changed to the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA). The message was clear: the FIA had a new sports governing body under a new boss with a new broom ready to sweep away a slow-moving, committee-bound bureaucracy. He then set about implementing his election manifesto, which had promised a ‘programme of action’ to generate ‘a worldwide spirit … respect for the international regulations … the reorganisation of the championships … the complete revision and simplification of the regulations … and the reduction of costs in motor sports’.2
He declared that there would be a reduction in the maximum number of cars from 26 to 24; a commitment from teams to take part in every round of the World Championship series; all drivers had to be Grade A licence holders to confirm Formula One-level driving skills, with each team nominating its season’s drivers in advance; financial guarantees from teams who failed to score any points in the previous season that they would be able to meet their obligations; and teams who did not have contracts with race organisers – namely non-FOCA teams – had to deposit a £15,000 guarantee with the FISA.