Bernie Ecclestone in particular was really amazingly old – seventy-five in 2005 – and his diminutive form, complete with immutable Byrds-era haircut, had been patrolling the paddock for decades. Despite being so familiar, he was, at the same time, oddly mysterious. What was definitely known about him was that, long ago, he had been a car dealer and an amateur racer (in Cooper 500s) just after the war, that he could ‘value an entire showroom of used cars in one glance’, and that he had owned the Brabham team in the 1970s. This in turn had given him an entry to what would become the Formula One Constructors’ Association; and in 1978, he assumed the position of FOCA’s Chief Executive.
In those days, there was still enough laissez-faire about the sport for race organisers and competing teams to leave it to Bernie to sort out the money so that they could get on with something else. The organisers didn’t pay out according to a published scale: they just handed the cash over to FOCA and let Bernie Ecclestone distribute it among the members according to his special formula. And while many queried the covert nature of FOCA’s cash transactions, others were curiously grateful – not least because Ecclestone had a genuine passion for motor racing and made it his business to keep struggling teams afloat so they might live to race another day. ‘First you get on, then you get rich, then you get honest,’ was one of Bernie’s more famous maxims; and he kind of meant it.
He was joined, meanwhile, by his alter ego, Max Mosley, son of Sir Oswald Mosley, and, like Ecclestone, a racing-driver manqué. Mosley, a tall, patrician, Oxford-educated barrister, was more or less an inverse of the diminutive Ecclestone, but as soon as their eyes met at a Constructor’s Association meeting (Mosley was running the March team at the time), both realised that they could achieve much together. Ecclestone took charge of the moving and shaking; Mosley the lawyer handled the fine print and man-management, alternately terrifying and charming those in FOCA’s path.
Time passed. Ecclestone and Mosley consolidated their positions. After all, the Formula One teams just wanted to make cars and race them: the nagging, chronic business of paying for everything, sorting out relationships with the outside world, managing the interests of the sport as a whole, never went away, but was at the same time deeply unsatisfying. They were mostly delighted to leave it all to the Odd Couple. And, by the early 1990s, what had happened, but Mosley was President of the FIA, having removed the prickly Jean-Marie Balestre, while Ecclestone had seen to it that the TV contracts to show Grand Prix races passed through FOCA. This stroke of entrepreneurial genius – accepting the centrality of TV to the success of any sport and exploiting it – made him not only extraordinarily powerful, but also staggeringly rich. Famously, in 1996, he drew Britain’s biggest known pay packet: £55.9 million. His net fortune in the early years of the twenty-first century was guesstimated to be around £3 billion.
All in all, it created an impression of consistency and capability. British teams felt comfortable with the fact that two Brits were in charge of things. Ferrari felt comfortable with the fact that, as the biggest and most glamorous team, they still had to be placated, whatever Williams and McLaren said. Everyone else just went alone with the status quo.
And yet the tough, technocratic combined front that Bernie and Max liked to project was only partly real. It was a little bit like the building of the British Empire. Ecclestone and Mosley had fought a determined and resourceful campaign to seize power and territory. Having seized power and territory, however, they were then faced with the problem of what to do with them: a question to which they didn’t always have an answer. Ecclestone had his brilliant coup for the TV rights. The rest of his time, though, seemed to be mostly spent putting together ideas that didn’t come off: digital pay-per-view TV; gold and silver medals at Grands Prix; weights in Schumacher’s car. Mosley, on the other hand (to take the most recent example), spent the end of 2008 and the start of 2009 disastrously trying to bludgeon the F1 teams to accept an unfeasible new budget-capping scheme, and very nearly created a rival, breakway, F1 circus by way of response. This contained echoes of the attempt made by the Grand Prix Manufacturers’ Association in 2001 to start their own rival GP World Championship, which, in turn, harked back to the incredibly divisive FISA–FOCA wars of the 1980s. At the end of which, Mosley had to fall on his own sword and give up his FIA presidency.
As an example of the measured and rational exercise of authority, in other words, the Ecclestone/Mosley axis has sometimes failed to impress.
But then, for such a macho pastime, Formula One can be quite hysterical, fractious and queeny when it wants to be. And, as such, it persistently leaves itself wide open to exploitation by a more determined entity (such as the Ecclestone/Mosley two-headed monster). Any change to the rules and regulations is still met with cries and complaints and disorderly threats to leave the sport. Teams run out of cash and have to be bailed out by one of Bernie’s unsung subventions, or just fold, leaving an ugly gap on the grid. In times of recession (early 1990s, now) or other financial crisis (after 9/11) everyone scrambles around panicking and trying to cut costs. As soon as the money flows again, everyone buys themselves a motorhome the size of a department store. There is no consistency, except within the fiefdoms of the very top teams. At the time of writing, the money has dried up again, and the regulations are being tweaked. ‘Formula One,’ according to Ron Dennis, ‘tends to be the last into a recession and the last out.’ The UK, still the centre of F1 technology, was, until recently, enjoying an annual turnover in Formula One of over £600 million. Any threat to this is apt to create mild panic. Who will survive? Will anyone survive? It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how it pans out.
And Bernie and Max? Max lost some of his poise when revelations about his private life were splurged all over the tabloids, which was followed by his unconnected decision to give up the FIA presidency. Bernie, meanwhile, was attracting opprobrium, first over his efforts to finesse the disappearance of cigarette sponsorship, then by claiming that Hitler ‘wasn’t a dictator’. In the middle of which, his intensely glamorous wife decided to leave him, somehow gloomily confirming what one of Ecclestone’s biographers had written about him at the start of the decade: ‘Do people want to know him or his money? He cuts a lonely and incomplete figure. The curse of Ecclestone’s life is that he has ended up getting what he wanted.’
There is an end-of-an-era feeling about Bernie and Max. They have had a good run, but things must change. And what will future historians make of them? Altogether, there is something authentically, messily Anglo-Saxon about the two technocrats and the world they have made. It is a world of muddle and improvise, as well as shrewd exploitation and clever insight. It has done the job, but it is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. And it generates the question: how would it have been different if a crisp Teuton had been in charge? What would F1 look like with Michael Schumacher running things?
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WHAT STRANGE NAMES ARE THESE? PART II
One might ask: while Michael Schumacher was winning an unprecedented, and probably unrepeatable, five Championships in a row, what, exactly, were the other teams doing? How had they let this happen? In the year 2002, for instance, Schumacher won eleven races; Rubens Barrichello (also Ferrari) won four; Ralf Schumacher won one, for Williams-BMW; David Coulthard won one, for McLaren-Mercedes. It was the usual suspects, in other words, but the sharing-out of victories was frankly bizarre.
Was anybody else even involved? Yes – serious names, at that: Renault, Jordan, Toyota, Jaguar, BAR-Honda, plus those stalwart triers Sauber (who never won a Grand Prix), Arrows (likewise) and Minardi (ditto). Between them, they scrounged together sixty-four points, spread over seventeen races: an average of eight points a team, for the entire season. Of course, 2002 was an exceptional year, and Renault and Jordan had already proven their credentials as race and, in Renault’s case, Championship winners. But even so.
For many, it was Jaguar who were the worst failures, not least because they were so unbelievably, ostentatiousl
y spendthrift in the way they went about failing. They were the perfect exemplars of the new phenomenon of Formula One As Speculative Bubble.
Having convinced themselves that the vast reach and international glamour of F1 were worth getting into in a bigger way than just by funding Cosworth engines, Ford – owners of Jaguar at the time – bought the promising Stewart Grand Prix team in 1999. This had been started by Jackie Stewart three years earlier and already boasted a GP win, courtesy of Johnnie Herbert, at the new Nürburgring. Ford paid an eye-watering $154 million for the outfit. They also signed Eddie Irvine, hot from Ferrari, and put him on, it was rumoured, a £15 million contract. And they bought themselves a vast travelling circus of hospitality suites and motorhomes, finished in a ditzy pearlescent reworking of Jaguar racing green, and stuck them dauntingly among the trailers and trucks of the existing Formula One teams. This was the high point.
For there on, it was a monotonous flop. Year one of competition saw them pick up four points. At the start of year two, Irvine announced that they would ‘deserve a good kicking’, if they didn’t make significant progress. ‘It will be difficult to do that badly again,’ he said, and, what do you know, they picked up nine points in 2001. Panicking, they sacked some people and brought in Niki Lauda to beat sense into what was left of the team. Lauda found that ‘The whole car was from beginning to end a disaster,’ ordered the building of a new wind-tunnel (at fabulous expense) and generally made his presence felt. ‘With our works team, Jaguar Racing, we are in Formula One to stay,’ boasted the Ford Motor Company’s chief operating officer. They scored eight points in 2002, one less than the year before.
For 2003, Lauda was sacked, and the team did marginally better, but in 2004, some kind of nadir of vulgarity was reached when a jewel merchant allowed Jaguar to stick a £100,000 diamond on the nose of each car at the Monaco GP: as a promotional gag, not, presumably, to improve the handling. When (new) number two driver Christian Klein crashed on the first lap, the diamond came off, went missing, and Jaguar were reduced to scrabbling around at the track edge, looking for it, before asking if anyone who might subequently have found it would hand it back to them. The season ended on a grand total of ten points, and Ford, who were now losing hundreds of millions of dollars on their Jaguar investments generally, pulled the plug on the team and put it (and Cosworth Racing) up for sale for £1.
Once upon a time, Jaguar Racing was being cried up as the answer to a nation’s prayer, a British racing green Ferrari. Now, it was like BRM and the V16, only fifty years on, with a budget the size of a small country’s GDP, and far more people watching. Then again, nobody ever got paid much (least of all at Ford) for their sense of history. Wise old farts shook their heads and said that it was typical of an American-owned effort – all flash and noise, no substance, and that the great days of the Cosworth DFV and the GT40 could never be recaptured.
Harder to understand, though, was the under-performance of the Toyota F1 team. Having plunged into Formula One in 2002, they weren’t expected to start winning straight away, but they could at least have done better than two points in 2002; sixteen in 2003; nine in 2004. After all, Toyota, at the time of writing, are the biggest car company in the world – by whatever measure you choose to employ – have an army of clever and diligent engineers to draw on, a tradition of thoroughness behind them, serious and deep-pocketed sponsors (i.e. Panasonic) plus mind-boggling industrial wealth: their total assets in 2008 standing at around a third of a trillion dollars. Yes, in 2005, things brightened a bit with a couple of third places for Ralf Schumacher and fourth place overall in the Constructors’ table. And they have managed some poles and some fastest laps. But seven years of trying and no Grand Prix win. Renault, with less money to hurl at the sport, won two World Championships in those years. What was Toyota’s problem?
Worse, what was Honda’s? This was even more pressing, given Honda’s reputation for engineering excellence, their Championship-winning engines (McLaren and Williams), their recent experiences with the BAR team, a competition history of their own (forty years earlier, admittedly), and a decent flavour of savvy aggression about them. When they relaunched themselves in 2006 as Honda Racing, they had all the right qualities, to say nothing of a brace of decent drivers – Jensen Button and Rubens Barrichello – as well as the good wishes of race fans everywhere. Three years later, they had given up in tears, with CEO Takeo Fukui wretchedly announcing that ‘Honda Motor Co. has come to the conclusion that we will withdraw from all Formula One activities, making 2008 the last season for participation.’ The team was costing £150 million a year to run, the sponsorship was not all it might have been, Button had done well in 2006, with a pole position in Australia and a win in Hungary, but after that nothing, nothing to speak of. And, in mid-2009, BMW announced that they, too, were going to give up Grand Prix racing. It was all so sad.
But if Toyota were on the brink of quitting and Honda and BMW (to all intents and purposes) had already bailed out, what hope for the rest? Minardi, who had been limping along on a £30 million budget, sold out to Toro Rosso. Jaguar sold out to Red Bull. Sauber, bless them, kept going, and even won the 2008 Canadian Grand Prix. Arrows went bust halfway through 2002 and were never heard of again. Super Aguri, a kind of Arrows/Honda spin-off, went bust at the end of 2008. Force India may stagger on for a while.
One would have said that really, now that the bubble has burst and the bling and spangles have been lobbed into the dumpster, it was all down to the old, irreducible hard core: Ferrari (with a budget that reached, at one time, £250 million), McLaren, Renault, and a Williams team which seems very slightly to have lost its mojo. It’s unnervingly like the mid-1950s, when Ferrari and Maserati (after the disappearance of Mercedes) had the place to themselves, with only distant rumblings from Vanwall and Connaught to disturb their ambitions.
One would have said: until some unnerving rule-changes for 2009 wrong-footed the big players and what do you know, Ross Brawn, Schumacher’s go-to guy at Ferrari, bought Honda’s cars and kit for a song, fitted Mercedes engines and, with yesterday’s man Jenson Button at the wheel, won six out of the first seven races of 2009. While Red Bull, with Renault engines, came good, and started a serious push for victory in mid-season. And then McLaren came back to life, and …
To continue the positive note: whatever the states of the various teams, the number of places in which you can hold a Grand Prix race has ballooned in the last decade, thanks to the tireless promotional work of Bernie Ecclestone, the Colonel Tom Parker of the sport. Ecclestone realised a while back that it was no good leaving the circus to trail around Europe, with occasional excursions to the English-speaking colonies (and Brazil). The market was heading eastward. Which meant the sudden arrival of some strange new circuits: Malaysia, Bahrain, Turkey, China, Singapore, Abu Dhabi – with South Korea and India waiting to join in. Thus, Formula One got some fresh destinations to visit; the destinations, by virtue of the arrival of Formula One, announced to the world that they were places of some importance. Everybody was a winner.
Except that, as is the way with these things, a gap has opened up between the modernisers and the traditionalists. The old, hairy, mad, circuits have either gone or been carefully spayed. No more Nürburgring, Zandvoort, Watkins Glen or Estoril. Hockenheim has been tamed. Monza and Suzuka are habitually being tinkered with. Spa and Monaco, opposite ends of the spectrum, still exist to terrify and infuriate, but they have something of the quality of difficult elderly relatives: impossible to ignore, but not quite what the younger generation wants to hang out with. What the world wants now is something more like the Sepang Circuit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
This prodigy is thought by many to be the best track in the world, and you can see why. It opened in 1999, cost $120 million to build, has a mass of thrill-packed corners of all flavours, as well as a couple of straights down which a modern F1 car can hit 186 mph. It has terrific grandstand views, and terrific grandstands, some with exotic inverted-parasol canopies. The f
acilities are excellent, the track is wide, it can hold 130,000 paying spectators, and the sweltering heat and humidity generate useful and entertaining extra levels of stress among the teams and drivers.
Only two small things militate against the all-round greatness of Sepang. One is that the track may be sinking in places, on account of having been built on a reclaimed swamp. The other is that it crowned Hermann Tilke as the doyen of circuit design, the Yves Saint Laurent of the modern stadium racetrack.
Is this really such a bad thing? German-born Tilke, having already had his way with the Österreichring and Hockenheim – doctoring and reducing them, according to his detractors, to disinfected pastiches of their former selves – set out his stall at Sepang, and most of the world was pleased. Bahrain, Shanghai and Istanbul all followed. Having raced in the European Touring Car Championship, Tilke reckons he knows what racing is about – ‘This has given me a feeling and a heart for motorsport’ – and that the fans should not only be able to see and hear the cars, but also ‘smell them’. His fondness for having a long, high-speed straight ending in a brake-boiling hairpin, cannot be gainsayed. Nor the gallimaufry of twiddles around the rest of the circuit. Nor the king-sized run-off areas, so vast that the fans often see the cars as so distant and dwarfish, they might be radio-controlled models. But there it is. ‘Safety is always the first aim,’ according to Tilke.
You have to move with the times; and however pregnant with history and character somewhere like Britain’s very own, very old, Silverstone might be, it is often a terrible place to view a race; and the facilities can be distinctly Welfare State. Hardly surprising, then, that (a) the British Grand Prix was being tipped to move to Donington, and (b) Hermann Tilke was given the job of buffing up the legendary circuit – where Auto Unions once thundered through the trees – making it safe for the twenty-first century, turning it into the Sepang of Leicestershire, in fact. It is only sour grapes, surely, to complain that, if hairy Donington is ever given a Tilke makeover, it will be a bit like all the other tracks. And that all the other tracks, Tilkified or not, are already increasingly alike. And that to complain about modern safety features, modern spectator facilities, well-equipped pit lanes, however depressingly similar they may be, is to mark you down as a closet Jenkinson.
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 23