Bernie Ecclestone

by Terry Lovell

  There was one other, little-publicised condition, but it was to the immense benefit of the teams. Unless an organiser first agreed financial terms with the FOCA, the FIA would not grant the organiser the right to stage a Grand Prix. It was done, at the FOCA’s insistence, to ensure that the FISA could not enhance the bargaining position of an organiser by including an event in the calendar before terms had been agreed with the teams. It put Ecclestone very much in the driving seat in negotiations, and would prove a seminal stage in his increasing control of Formula One. As for Balestre, he appeared pleased with the deal because it was his hope to take back all of the rights at the end of the four-year agreement so that the FIA could run its own championship, as it ran the rest of the world’s motor sport, an ambition which, in his negotiations with Ecclestone, he would never succeed in achieving.

  This was the essence of the Maranello Agreement, which was agreed by Ecclestone and Mosley with Balestre over breakfast in the Hôtel Crillon next to the FIA headquarters, which were situated in the Automobile Club de France’s offices in Place de la Concorde. Balestre had one stipulation – he wanted the document to be known as the Concorde Agreement, a matter that was of complete indifference to both Ecclestone and Mosley. It was agreed that he would sign the agreement by 8 February, only a matter of days away. But the petulant Frenchman, hoping perhaps to restore some lost pride, if not authority, was not done with his power games. He suddenly objected to the proposed number of FOCA seats on the Formula One Commission. On 20 February Ecclestone and Mosley flew to Paris to discuss his concerns. The issue was resolved, but Balestre continued to withhold his assent.

  First, he insisted, Ecclestone had to bring an end to the FOCA’s High Court injunctions against the FISA and its executive committee members which prohibited him from interfering with the FOCA’s contracts with the circuit owners. He argued that to sign the agreement while the injunction was still in place would be tantamount to violating it. Balestre telexed his terms to Ecclestone at the South African Grand Prix, but at that time he was, in fact, in Rio de Janeiro negotiating sponsorship for the Brazilian Grand Prix. Ecclestone replied that the injunction would be lifted once Balestre agreed to put his signature to the agreement. At last Balestre agreed to do so. His delaying tactics had achieved little, other than to cause the constructors and the manufacturers to seriously consider joining forces to stage and govern their own World Championship series.

  On 11 March 1981 the Concorde Agreement was formally signed at the headquarters of the FIA in Paris, to take effect from 1 January for a period of four years. Yet even then, there was one signature missing, that of Enzo Ferrari, who, at the last minute, dramatically decided to withhold his blessing after claiming there was still a number of questions to be answered. It was added to the agreement two weeks later, accompanied by the observation of some commentators that it had been a theatrical stunt by Ferrari to steal the limelight as the man who had formally brought an end to the longest on-off suicide attempt in sporting history.

  So who won the war? It seemed at the time that neither side had emerged victorious. All that had been established had been the boundaries of each other’s turf. The FOCA had established the right to continue, through Ecclestone, to control all financial matters relevant to the constructors’ interests, while the FISA had established the right to continue to be responsible for the rules and regulations, with a say in proposed changes going both to the constructors and the manufacturers. The constructors no longer had their ‘skirts’, although future events would prove otherwise, but they had been prepared to give them up, and they had got what they wanted anyway – an acceptable period of notice before new technical rule changes were introduced.

  If the war exposed the constructors’ financial vulnerability, it also revealed the FISA’s political vulnerability. The governing body had failed to bring the constructors to heel, and was forced to realise that without them it could not effectively stage a World Championship series and that, consequently, they had to be accepted on equal terms. Divided, the two were a far lesser force, a fact that over the years, which had seen so much time, energy and money expended, had become blindingly obvious to those in the ringside seats. At that time there appeared to be no apparent victor, although the chief beneficiary, over the years ahead, would prove to be Ecclestone, who would go on to exploit the television rights so shrewdly. Said the former FIA official: ‘It was Ecclestone who won the spoils of the war. He got the television rights, which, as things turned out, would be the true prize.’

  Peter Warr, who took over the running of Team Lotus in December 1982 following the death of Colin Chapman, believes that Ecclestone’s great skill was in playing to Balestre’s megalomania. The Frenchman saw himself, said Warr, as ‘the all-singing and all-dancing dictator, with nothing happening unless he said so. One of Bernie’s great achievements was to allow Balestre to continue thinking that, while in reality it wasn’t true. He basically said, well, let’s keep humouring him and keep him believing that he is the one that matters, and we’ll get on and do our own thing and make sure it happens. Balestre, to whom adornments were so important, got the trappings of office but none of the substance. Certainly, he could go into the FIA headquarters and throw the most huge wobblies and he could come to circuits and interrupt stewards in the middle of drivers’ briefings and he could go out on the track and shout at individuals but all that was huff and puff. It was Bernie who really won the war against the FISA.’

  So, at last, peace and goodwill had been restored to the turbulent world of Formula One. At least, so it appeared. There were fresh storms brewing, even before the ink on the Concorde Agreement had dried. But this time it was between the constructors, and would reveal yet again how the forces of self-interest that had united them in their battles against the FISA would now work to divide them, with two of their leading personalities – Ecclestone and Colin Chapman – once more the target of each other’s wrath.

  Centre stage in the first split was a car with a twin-chassis body, known as the Lotus 88. It was Chapman’s innovative solution to a problem caused by the massive downforce created by the development of ‘skirts’, which required heavier suspension springs. The almost solid suspension, not to mention the much increased cornering G-force, gave the driver quite a buffeting and affected a car’s drivability. Chapman’s answer was to suspend the body unit and undertray as a separate downforce-creating assembly, with linkage to the outboard ends of the front and rear lower wishbones. As the downforce created by the body unit passed directly to the wheels, it bypassed a conventional chassis, which carried the engine, gearbox and driver on lighter springing to achieve comfort, traction and drivability. It was ingeniously clever, and led a number of teams to pursue the time-honoured course of action when faced with a car which threatened to make theirs uncompetitive: if time or money made copying impossible, get it banned on the grounds that it broke the rules.

  The protests began at the USA West Grand Prix at Long Beach, the first race of the 1981 season, despite a ruling by the scrutineers that it was perfectly legal. Nevertheless, the opposing teams – ten backed a ban, five did not, including Tyrrell and Fittipaldi, while Ferrari merely objected to the decision of the scrutineers – claimed it violated article three, paragraph seven of the FIA’s technical regulations, which stated that all parts of a car having an influence on aerodynamic performance had to remain immobile in relation to the sprung part of the car. Chapman argued that the aerodynamics of the twin-chassis were immobile to at least one of them and therefore fully conformed to the regulations.

  After his argument failed to stifle protests at an emergency meeting of the teams, he lodged an appeal with the Automobile Competition Committee for the United States (ACCUS), which, after hearing technical submissions from chief aerodynamicist Peter Wright at a two-day hearing in Atlanta, Georgia, backed the scrutineers and ruled it legal. However, the constructors refused to withdraw their threat, which Chapman believed to be no more than a bluff, but the or
ganisers weren’t prepared to call it. During an untimed practice session the car was ‘black-flagged’. At the Argentine Grand Prix the following month, where once again it was excluded from the race following protests from the teams, Chapman was so incensed that he issued a statement critical of Balestre and Ecclestone. He suspected that Balestre had given support to Ecclestone’s efforts to kill off the Lotus 88.

  The statement had been written by the convivial and widely respected Gérard ‘Jabby’ Crombac – the then French representative on the FISA’s Technical Commission, a French motor sport magazine journalist and a lifelong admirer of Lotus – who believed the design of Chapman’s car was in accord with the letter of the rule book. However, after Balestre was given a copy of the statement, his translator, Dublin-born David Waldron, pointed out that it had not been written by an Englishman. Balestre made enquiries and became enraged on discovering that Crombac was the author. Chapman, rushing to catch a flight to Cape Canaveral to watch a missile launch, had dictated the statement to Crombac, whose hurried notes led to mistakes noted by Waldron. On returning home, Crombac discovered that Balestre’s punishment was swift: he had been sacked as chairman of the Technical Commission of the Fédération Française du Sport Automobile, which automatically disqualified him from the FISA’s Technical Commission. When Chapman heard what had happened, with typical panache he threw Crombac the keys to his own Lotus Eclat 2.2, with the comment: ‘That’s the least I can do for you.’

  For the record, Chapman went to the FIA’s Court of Appeal in Paris for a final judgement, which he lost. Apart from a practice session at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone that year – it was prohibited from taking part – the Lotus 88 did not appear again. The incident, however, illustrated the double standard which prevailed among the teams due to the intense rivalry. Also competing in the Argentine Grand Prix had been the less spectacular Ferrari 126CK. Contrary to the FISA’s rule book, the side pods touched the ground at more than one point of the circuit on a full fuel load. But, unlike Chapman’s twin-chassis design, the car did not pose the same competitive threat. Its illegality was not pursued.

  Ecclestone believed that Chapman had been the architect of his own misfortune. He made a fundamental mistake in not notifying the teams in advance of his new concept. In a forthright and affable face-to-face meeting, the teams who came out in opposition would have found it difficult to go against good ol’ ‘Chunky’ Chapman. By keeping it under wraps, until its performance spoke for itself during a practice session at the USA West Grand Prix, Chapman was giving a clear signal that he didn’t give a damn what the other teams thought. The teams’ response, opined Ecclestone, was: ‘OK, we’ll attack it through the rule book.’

  Balestre was extremely embarrassed by Crombac’s involvement in the Lotus statement because, as Chapman had suspected, he had indeed assured Ecclestone of his support in formally objecting to the Lotus 88. Accordingly, Balestre insisted that if it didn’t contravene the letter of the law, it did so in spirit. The incident so angered Basil Tye, Managing Director of the British Royal Automobile Club’s Motor Sports Association, which had sanctioned the entry of the Lotus 88, that he had a stand-up row with Balestre at the British Grand Prix. It resulted in Balestre’s exclusion from the RAC’s hospitality suite. Balestre responded by withdrawing an invitation to the Englishman to serve as a steward at the Dutch Grand Prix. Tye, not given to personal animus, nevertheless believed that Balestre’s autocratic and bombastic style vitiated any sense of fair play, and that his intention to stand that October for re-election as president of the FISA for a further four years could not go unchallenged. Despite some encouraging early support, but without the political resources and allies, not to mention guile and influence to win wider backing, his efforts came to naught. A widely respected figure who had been involved in motor sport for more than 30 years, and who was said to have been bitterly disappointed when promised support for his candidature failed to materialise, Tye collapsed and died six months later while sailing his motor yacht, Mosport, near his home in Poole, Dorset.

  According to a senior FIA representative at the time, Ecclestone had urged Balestre to oppose the Lotus 88 because he wanted the stage cleared for the latest Brabham car – the BT49C – which was about to be unveiled, and which was no less inventive. For some months Brabham’s chief designer, Gordon Murray, had been working on ways of getting round the FISA ruling preventing the use of ‘skirts’, which stated that at the start and end of a race there had to be a 6-centimetre gap between the track and car and that there should be no systematic contact with the track while the car was in motion. Anticipating the imaginative efforts of designers to get round this obstacle, the ruling also prohibited any driver-operated system that enabled the lowering of the car during a race. Murray’s clever solution was the BT49C’s complex hydro-pneumatic suspension system, which used aerodynamic force to pass fluid from the suspension through a series of tiny valves and into a central reservoir which ‘pulled’ the car down as long as it was travelling at speed.

  When the driver slowed down at the end of the race, compressed air returned the fluid through the valves and back into the suspension, causing it to rise to the minimum ride height of 6 centimetres. The car further complied with the new rule in that its ‘skirts’ did not systematically make contact with the tracks, as the condition of the ‘rubbing strips’ proved. It was estimated that the system gave the Brabham cars 80 per cent of the downforce of the banned ‘skirts’ while rival teams had no more than 40 per cent. At the Argentine Grand Prix, Nélson Piquet, Brabham’s lead driver, took the chequered flag, pole position and the fastest lap.

  Predictably, the BT49C raised howls of protests from the other teams, which were led with some enthusiasm by a Colin Chapman still smarting from Ecclestone’s successful efforts in the banning of his Lotus 88. No less enthusiastic were the manufacturers, who claimed it made a mockery of the Concorde Agreement, and that the costly war between the FOCA and the FISA over ‘skirts’ had all been for nothing. Unable to figure out how the system worked, some claimed that it was illegal because it had to be driver-operated. To keep them off the scent, Murray mischievously got his mechanics to build a little aluminium box and put it under the bodywork with some wires coming out leading to the gearbox. ‘Everybody concentrated on the box and nobody looked at the valves,’ recalled Murray.

  By the fifth round of the 1981 World Championship series, the Belgian Grand Prix, by which time Piquet had taken two firsts and a third, it became clear that it was in danger of becoming a one-horse race. The Formula One Commission, alarmed that the disadvantage to the other teams would harm the championship’s competitive appeal, came up with a political compromise that sanctioned Murray’s hydro-pneumatic system, which became known as Automatic Ride Control. It allowed the other teams to introduce a similar system operated by the drivers. It resolved an increasingly threatening situation – at one stage Enzo Ferrari threatened to revert to the banned ‘skirts’ unless the Brabham team’s hydro-pneumatic system was declared illegal – but it was a solution that left him and Ecclestone spitting feathers. ‘Suddenly everybody got let off the hook,’ said Murray. ‘Bernie and I went bananas because, again, [a reference to the controversial ‘fan’ car of 1978] they had taken this big advantage from us.’ All the same, he remained optimistic. ‘I knew it would take four or five races before they would get it anywhere near right, by which time we would have the Championship sewn up.’ Indeed it would. Piquet went on to win the first of his two World Championships with Brabham after outmanoeuvring Carlos Reutemann in the final race of the season at Las Vegas.

  By the end of the year the FISA had formally scrapped the 6-centimetre ride height, which ended the future of Murray’s hydro-pneumatic system, and had approved the use of 8-centimetre deep ‘skirts’. All in all, a season that had begun so ominously ended well for Ecclestone, both politically and on the circuit. And he also had acquired in Balestre a new friend – the same man who shortly after his electio
n as president of the CSI had pledged to resign if, in his mission to bring the FOCA to book, he had not banned ‘skirts’ within 12 months. To the constructors’ great advantage, and Ecclestone’s in particular, he had achieved neither.

  That a new day had dawned in the relationship between Balestre and the constructors, one that coincided with the signing of the Concorde Agreement, was indicated by his response to protests by the manufacturers at another masterly attempt by the teams – notably Williams and Brabham – to counter the power of the turbos by bending the rule which stated that the minimum weight of a car at the beginning and end of a race had to be 580 kilograms. This, the constructors argued with some justification, favoured the heavier, turbocharged cars. Williams and Brabham rose to the challenge by installing ‘water-cooling’ brake reservoirs in their cars, which, when topped up with water, complied with the minimum weight rule. But, once on the track, the water was dispersed, enabling the cars to run at a considerably lighter weight. At the end of the race the reservoirs were topped up to meet the minimum weight requirement. To the fury of the manufacturers, and Ferrari in particular, it was perfectly legal, complying precisely with the letter of the FIA’s rule book.