by Terry Lovell
The company demanded that the teams signed an Event Accreditation Agreement acknowledging that the global commercial rights belonged to the FIA. But the teams, angry at the way in which they saw the series being hijacked for Ecclestone’s financial benefit, refused to comply. The FIA came to ISC’s aid by announcing a new rule, Article 28, which without warning was imposed on the teams during the 1994 Monte Carlo Rally. It vested in the FIA all film and picture rights and authorised ISC to claim them on its behalf. The manufacturers faced the choice: either sign the agreement or lose FIA authorisation and World Championship status. They signed.
Under the agreement’s terms, no longer would host broadcasters be allowed to show the series free of charge. Instead, the World Rally Teams Association (WRTA), which until its demise in 1999 represented the manufacturers, became formally responsible for commissioning television coverage of the series for distribution to broadcasters worldwide, while ISC would negotiate the all-important financial terms. The contract for providing coverage was won by BBC Worldwide Ltd, an independent television production company whose predecessor, BBC Enterprises Ltd, was set up in 1979 to develop a co-ordinated approach to the BBC’s commercial activities. ISC decreed that the manufacturers would pick up BBC Worldwide’s production costs – thought to be in excess of £2 million a year, a figure which, on the grounds of contractual confidentiality, the WRTA refused to confirm. ISC’s marketing operation then moved in to sell the film to national and international broadcasters at considerable profit.
However, ISC discovered another way of making money out of the manufacturers: if a manufacturer wanted to use film from an event as part of, say, a marketing campaign, ISC insisted on the full market fee, even though, of course, it was the manufacturers’ chequebooks which made the series possible in the first place. The same applied if a manufacturer wanted to hire a film crew to shoot one of its own cars for a special marketing promotion. The company had to negotiate a contract with ISC and pay a top-dollar rate. ‘Whatever happens, the money always flowed into Mr Ecclestone’s pockets,’ said an independent producer.
While manufacturers conceded that the involvement of ISC led to an increase in the quality of coverage of the World Rally Championship series, they added that its benefit was greatly diminished by a marked drop in television viewing figures, a costly predicament well known to the organisers of other events subjected to ISC’s marketing strategy. It proved a major disappointment in a motor sport that, according to Mitsubishi Ralliart and Toyota Motorsport, the sporting divisions of the two manufacturers, had ‘probably’ attracted the largest spectator audiences of any sport in the world. The fall in television coverage had, they claimed, caused greater difficulty in attracting sponsors, who had gravitated towards Formula One.
Not for the first time, ISC’s claims in respect of the television coverage it had achieved led to an interesting conflict of statistics. The company reported that in 1997 it had succeeded in achieving 18 hours and 37 minutes of coverage in France, 25 hours and 26 minutes in Germany and 17 hours and 55 minutes in the UK. However, according to figures supplied by Sri International, a Brussels-based independent television monitoring research company, to the European Commission, its data for the same period told a very different story: 5 hours and 37 minutes in France, 21 hours and 3 minutes in Germany and 9 hours and 29 minutes in the UK.
Ecclestone claims that he tried to increase the appeal of the series by proposing at that time that it did away with reconnaissance, which was considered a crucial part of the pre-event preparation to note the route hazards. Instead, he said, competitors should drive ‘blind’. It had, he added, the extra advantage of reducing the competitors’ workload. Perhaps, but it provoked a wave of criticism and was condemned by drivers as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘too dangerous’.
Ecclestone, once again supported by Mosley, argues today, as they did then, that it was quite the reverse – knowing the hazards ahead through reconnaissance tempted drivers to push their skills, and luck, to the limit, which increased the possibility of accidents. For years, said Mosley, competitors in the RAC rally relied on standard pace notes until the rally establishment successfully lobbied for the introduction of reconnaissance. ‘They spent a fortune doing these three-week “recces” and the accident rate actually went up.’ All the same, it seemed a curious viewpoint from someone who had consistently supported the appeal of more dramatic television.
He subsequently lost all interest in rallying, which, coincidentally, suffered a downward spiral in television coverage, failing to recapture the popularity of earlier years. Predictably, Ecclestone sees the results achieved by ISC in quite a different light. ‘Before we took the TV rights, [the coverage] was much worse. We improved them a lot, and [it] is not much better now, except it costs the guy that’s running it quite a lot more than it cost us.’
A clue to its lack of success can perhaps be found in a comment he later made about rallying: ‘It’s like watching the Olympics and then a load of amateurs. It’s not a spectator sport, it’s for competitors; people don’t want to watch it.’ Certainly Ecclestone wasn’t keen to do so as a spectator. Although they were in the company of a world champion driver and navigator, he and Mosley got lost on their way to the only rally that he has ever attended. ‘Bernie took one look at the mud,’ said Mosley, ‘one look at his shoes, and said, “I’m not going out there,” closed the door and drove off.’
Ecclestone’s criticism of rally driving was in marked contrast to an opinion he expressed on his appointment as vice-president of promotional affairs, when he declared that rallying was one of three events that would form the ‘basic structure’ of motor sport of the future. The other two, he said, would be Formula One and Procar. He expressed a grand vision to see motor sport fans turning on their television sets every Saturday afternoon in every country in the world, when they would be able to watch some form of the sport, including motorcycle racing. He said: ‘The only obstacle to getting it right is people.’10 It was the opinion of many in motor sport that he had had no intention of getting it right if it in any way threatened Formula One and, thus, his financial interests.
A former employee of Ecclestone’s confirmed what many had long suspected – that once he had become involved in the promotion of a motor sport that might threaten Formula One’s television dominance, it was gradually starved of the lifeline of promotion and publicity. It was, he believed, Ecclestone’s deliberate policy to kill off the competition to keep Formula One at the top of television’s motor sport schedules. ‘If you look at the history of motor sport outside Formula One, Bernie has dipped in and out of motorbikes, sports cars, rally cars, and the people who were running these motor sports were always in the shadow of Formula One and they were torn between going hell-for-leather against Formula One, or being tempted by Bernie saying, “Come into the family, I’ll build it up, I’ll make it another Formula One.”
‘But what Bernie tended to do was to just get hold of it and then just kill it. And they’ve [the organisers] signed a contract for three years before they could think of getting out of it. From a long way back, Bernie saw Formula One as the only product and he would do whatever he needed to do to ensure that Formula One stayed on that pedestal. There have been many times when Formula One has been extremely boring … when I think broadcasters were questioning why they were paying such large sums of money. And there were some attractive alternatives [such as] motorcycle racing, Group C sports cars and touring cars [which] could all have presented a serious threat to Formula One. If you look at the essence of why Bernie is so successful, I think a very key part of it has been his ability to keep, one way or another, Formula One up there, head and shoulders above everything else, with the exception of the US, and to keep everybody else down.’
Ecclestone concedes that such comments reflect ‘what lots of people said, but it’s not true. We spent a lot of money trying to improve [television coverage of other championship series] … we got better television coverage than what t
hey had before, and it is certainly better than what is being done now. So anyone who says we tried to kill it off is just talking rubbish.’
Notes
1. Autocar, 30 May 1981.
2. Daily Mail, 7 May 1977.
3. Autosport, 16 April 1987.
4. Autosport, 17 March 1988.
5. Autosport, 2 August 1990.
6. Autosport, 14 November 1991.
7. Autosport, 2 August 1990.
8. Autosport, 27 June 1991.
9. Autosport, 17 March 1988.
10. Independent, 5 February 1988.
12
THE RISE OF PRESIDENT MAX, HOW THE FIA LOST MILLIONS, AND THE SHOWDOWN IN BRUSSELS
The ascent to power of Bernie Ecclestone was paralleled by the fortunes of his friend and confidant Max Mosley, who, by the end of the eighties, had risen from the role of the constructors’ legal adviser in the days of the protracted FOCA–FISA war of attrition to being a member of the executive committee of the FISA by virtue of his appointment as president of the Manufacturers’ Commission. Now, as the nineties beckoned, the suave 51-year-old would shortly be preparing to reach the pinnacle of motor sport – the presidency of the FISA itself.
Given Ecclestone’s multi-functional roles, Mosley’s reason for standing had more than a touch of irony. He believed that Balestre, as president of the FIA, the FISA and France’s national sporting authority, the Fédération Française du Sport Automobile (FFSA), was guilty of an ‘overwhelming conflict of interest’. He asserted that the ‘President of the FISA should have no other job in motor sport’. There was certainly good reason to believe that the weight of Balestre’s different hats was proving overly stressful: in November 1986 he suffered a heart attack, which surprised few who had witnessed over the years his hot-tempered and highly excitable manner. It provided an opportunity for a touch of high drama, which his Gallic temperament adored. Accompanied somewhat dramatically by a doctor and nurse a few weeks later, he arrived at a meeting of the FIA’s executive committee to announce that he intended to retire, fuller details of which he would make known once he had fully recuperated. In the new year, at a special meeting of the executive committee, he confirmed his intention to retire at the next meeting of the General Assembly in October.
But in June he did a U-turn and informed the executive committee that he intended to run for the vacancy. When a delegate later reminded him that he had said he was going to retire, he replied: ‘Yes, but I didn’t say I wouldn’t stand as a candidate.’ It was a flippancy that caused him to make a serious miscalculation, and which would contribute significantly to events that would bring about his fall from office. For although he was re-elected, in October 1987, he believed that it was for a full four-year term, taking him to 1991, whereas delegates believed they had voted him back in office to complete his previous unfilled term of two years, taking him to 1989, when the president, as was the tradition, was due to stand for re-election, along with the vice-presidents and World Motor Sport Council (WMSC) delegates.
Balestre’s insistence that it was for a four-year term put him out of synchronisation with the general elections and caused him, in 1991, to overlook the fact that he was due to stand that October. It wasn’t until August of that year that his misinterpretation was corrected by Marco Piccinini during a visit to Balestre’s holiday home in Opio, near Grasse, in the south of France. As the two men enjoyed the cool water of the swimming pool, Piccinini casually enquired what his host was planning to do about his forthcoming election. ‘Election?’ replied Balestre. ‘What election?’ The realisation of his error, and the embarrassment of its implications, pulled him up with a dreadful start.
At a dinner for motor sport journalists a day or two later, he seized the opportunity to calmly announce that, as of that moment, his campaign for re-election was underway. He put on a confident and self-assured front, but privately he remained highly discomfited by the mistake and furious with the FISA’s general secretary, Yvon Léon, whom he unfairly blamed. Léon, he insisted, should have reminded him, though there is no reason why he should have known that Balestre needed ‘reminding’. However, if Balestre had been caught napping, Mosley hadn’t.
Like others, he had been aware of Balestre’s gaffe and found that it offered him the perfect opportunity to set about his political ambitions within the FIA. Indeed, for at least three months he had been busy on the hustings, quietly lobbying the support of the more influential delegates. It proved not to be a difficult mission, due in no small part to an invulnerability that Balestre may have believed his alliance with Ecclestone had given him. He had come to believe that he no longer needed to maintain the support or goodwill of the delegates because, in the words of a senior member of the World Motor Sport Council, he felt that he ‘no longer had to rely on anybody. He knew that if he had Bernie [on his side], he didn’t need to ask anybody what to do, because everybody was either fearful of him or Bernie. But it isolated him from the people whose support he now needed.’
An apparent tendency to look for problems where none existed added to his notoriety. ‘He could never operate unless he had an opponent out there,’ added the senior member of the WMSC. ‘When he didn’t have an adversary he created one.’ It was an egocentric imperiousness that also earned Balestre the scorn of the media through a tendency to make inflammatory accusations which, ruing their repercussions, he would then deny having made. Now 70, he was seen as an unpopular despot who was ready for toppling. It was a mood that the charming and energetic Mosley was most willing and able to exploit.
He concentrated his early efforts in countries he considered less likely to be in thrall to Balestre. One of his first, and most important, stops was America, where he sought the support of the national sporting authority, the Automobile Competition Committee for the United States (ACCUS), whose members voted overwhelmingly in favour of backing him. There were just two dissenters – senior figures in motor sport, who believed that Mosley would not succeed unless he was able to enlist the support of Ecclestone, a view expressed to him at a private meeting. Ecclestone, it was suggested, should be persuaded to indicate to the more vulnerable Grand Prix countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Australia and Japan, that they would lose their Grand Prix unless Mosley received their support.
Ecclestone himself was apparently not at all convinced that Mosley would win. In a subsequent phone conversation with one of the two senior motor sport figures, he expressed the view that Mosley ‘didn’t have much of a chance’. A senior FIA delegate believed that Ecclestone decided against adding his weight to Mosley’s cause. ‘I think he [Ecclestone] played it right down the middle. It was a smart move. He was solid with Balestre, and he knew he had Max, anyway. He put himself in a position where he couldn’t lose.’ It is a view that, up to a point, Mosley shares, although he believed that, due to a common language, he was Ecclestone’s preferred choice. ‘I think Bernie Ecclestone would have been quite happy with me or Balestre. He was on good terms with both. However, as he doesn’t speak French and Balestre speaks little English, he probably finds it easier to communicate with me.’
Another early stop for Mosley was Japan. As president of the Manufacturers’ Commission, he had used his position effectively to establish cordial relationships with companies such as Toyota, then the world’s second-biggest car manufacturer, and which had considerable influence with the national sporting authority, the Japanese Automobile Federation (JAF). But even without Toyota’s influence, Mosley was in already in a favourable position due to Balestre’s behaviour two years earlier at the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka.
He found himself controversially involved in a highly public row after Ayrton Senna collided with Alain Prost in the forty-sixth lap, taking his archrival out of a race that was crucial to his World Championship hopes. Historical accounts accuse Balestre of insisting that Senna, who went on to cross the line, should be disqualified for ‘dangerous manoeuvres’. Senna himself charged Balestre with attempting to
manipulate the race in favour of his countryman, which attracted wide media coverage. But on this occasion at least, Balestre, who was not unknown to use his authority to influence FIA inquiries, was not guilty. He had made the mistake of entering the stewards’ room as they were still studying reports and videos. It was misconstrued that he had joined the stewards with one intent – to ensure they came down on Prost’s side. ‘But that wasn’t the case,’ said one of the stewards, who was present in the room. ‘All he said was, “I am glad that I do not have to make that decision.”’
The decision to disqualify Senna, who came second to Prost for the World Championship title, was based on the fact that Senna had restarted his car and rejoined the race, not at the point of exit but after cutting across an entire chicane. The decision later caused McLaren boss Ron Dennis to threaten legal action against the FISA, which fuelled even further negative publicity for Balestre. It had all been very embarrassing for his proud Japanese hosts, but it was a minor incident compared to the offence caused by Balestre’s decision not to attend a dinner in honour of Crown Prince Takamatsu earlier in the week. It was made in petulant mood following an incident during a qualifying session, when Nigel Mansell suddenly stopped his car. Thirty seconds earlier the race director had left the control room at the request of an official of the JAF, who was concerned that the FIA delegation should be ready on time to be bussed to the dinner in Nagoya, Japan’s third-largest city, in the Chubu region, and some distance from the circuit. While the official was being reassured, the race director turned to see through the control room’s glass window that his colleagues were all staring intently at the television screen. Concerned, he returned to see on the screen Mansell standing by his car. He immediately called for a red flag.