Bernie Ecclestone interview: ‘People don't go to F1 for a lecture from the drivers’

Gstaad is the lair of the billionaire, a little Alpine nirvana so saturated with wealth that even the prices for fondue are faintly heartbreaking. The ornate wooden chalets lining the central promenade bear the insignia of global haute couture: Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, Prada, Chopard. Only one, Hotel Olden, still seems authentically Swiss, with its hand-painted facade, vibrant window boxes and history of resident yodellers. It is here that Bernie Ecclestone suggests meeting at 11.30am. The choice is less sentimental than practical. After all, he owns the place.

The management move to high alert at the news “Mr E” is en route. Furnishings are inspected, places laid, potential backdrops for the photoshoot mapped out. Half an hour early, an unmistakeable, snowy-haired figure materialises at the door. “Just got to see someone first,” he tells me, with a roguish grin. Ecclestone, the consummate dealmaker, is always seeing someone. “He never, ever stops,” says Jovan, his travelling household manager. Quite the tribute, all told, for a 92-year-old.

We take our seats, eventually, in the conservatory, a perfect spot for people-watching. Every few minutes, in a kitschy touch to seduce the jet set, a horse-drawn sleigh rolls past. “All part of the act,” Ecclestone says. And he should know, after half a lifetime spent transforming Formula One into the ultimate expression of money-no-object decadence. On Sunday, the circus rumbles into life once more, in Bahrain, and he intends to be there. He might not be the ringmaster any longer, but he is a close friend of the kingdom’s ruling family, the Al-Khalifa.

Sport will never see another like him, and he knows it. “It’s like Frank Sinatra singing. You’re not going to find another Sinatra. You see the guy who used to run football?” Who, Sepp Blatter? “Mm. He was a bit special, with the way he ran things.” But people did accuse him of being dictatorial, I point out. The same charge has repeatedly been levelled at Ecclestone.

“You see, I’m not somebody who’s super-enthusiastic about democracy. By definition, it can’t work. Look at England, the politics is 50-50, so which one is right? We’ve got to follow this or follow that. That’s what democracy is. It’s the wrong word, ‘dictator’. You need to have a boss. I always say, when I’m doing business with people, I want to deal with the people who can turn the lights on and off. I don’t want someone who has to make a report or get other people’s opinions before making a decision.”

Ecclestone, in tinted glasses and a beige fleece jacket over a white shirt, looks remarkably fit for a man in his tenth decade. And there is no doubt that he conveys, even at 5ft 3in, a strikingly godfather-like authority. Especially when his mobile phone rings with Ennio Morricone’s theme music for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Since he was dethroned as F1’s chief executive in 2017, his my-way-or-the-highway philosophy has been conspicuous by its absence. During his era, it was only Hollywood A-listers or European royalty who would be granted pre-race grid access. Today, it is such a cavalcade of rappers, Instagram influencers and assorted hangers-on that at one recent grand prix in Texas, Martin Brundle found himself barged aside by Megan Thee Stallion’s bodyguard. “Let’s put it this way,” he says. “If I were still there, I wouldn’t be doing a lot of the things that they’ve done.”

One habit on which he would crack down is the new-found fondness among drivers for making political statements. Barely a race goes by without somebody accentuating a grievance or a cause: it could be Lewis Hamilton wearing a rainbow helmet in Qatar to promote LGBT rights, or an “Arrest the Cops” T-shirt at Mugello to highlight the case of Breonna Taylor, the Kentucky medical worker shot dead by seven police officers in March 2020. Or it might be Sebastian Vettel peeling off his overalls to reveal a “Same Love” message, criticising Viktor Orban’s restrictions on the teaching of homosexuality in Hungarian schools.

“People don’t go to a Formula One race to have a lecture,” Ecclestone says. “Definitely drivers should have free speech, but it’s a case of when and how they use it.” With the outbreak of T-shirt activism, he clearly feels that a line has been crossed. “It’s wrong. It’s all completely wrong. I’m 100 per cent against it.”

The world governing body, the FIA, is with him, urging drivers to go easy on the political tub-thumping this year. Except Hamilton, in particular, appears in no mood to listen, least of all to Ecclestone. Last summer, Ecclestone suggested that he should “brush aside” a racial slur about him by former world champion Nelson Piquet, prompting this withering rebuke: “I don’t know why we are continuing to give these older voices a platform.”

Ecclestone bristles at Hamilton’s scorn of him as an “older voice”. “Maybe the older generation are not interested in listening to what he has to say. In general, the older generation have seen a lot more, done a lot more.” Warming to his subject, he even suggests that Hamilton was just sore at losing publicity. “Maybe, when the older generation are making statements, and some people think they’re correct, he doesn’t like it, because it’s taking up the space that he would normally have.”

You can understand his soreness. Contrary to popular perception, F1’s ascent to the realm of Netflix soap opera did not start with Hamilton. It began with a Warren Street second-hand car dealer called Bernard Charles Ecclestone, who engineered the astonishing coup to exploit F1’s commercial rights for 100 years and set about turning it into an impossibly ritzy, multi-billion-pound industry. Would Hamilton have so many accoutrements – the Colorado mansion, the garage of supercars, the Tommy Hilfiger fashion line – without him?

Ecclestone’s career constitutes one of the great sporting tapestries. Having left school at the age of 16, he supplemented his income by selling spare motorcycle parts. His talents as a wheeler-dealer were such that the supplier business he built, Compton & Ecclestone, became the largest in Britain. He would replicate this alchemist’s touch in F1, buying the Brabham team for £100,000 in 1972 and selling it for 40 times that amount 15 years later. The formula for prosperity and fame was gloriously simple. But in 2023, he admits to being bewildered by the world he inhabits.

“So many things in the world have changed,” Ecclestone says. “And the older generation can remember the changes. For the younger generation, it’s not the things from the past that they want to remember. People now have much more freedom to be heard. It’s all this telephone business. You or I could put something on the phone now and it would be seen worldwide.”

And is that dangerous? “Most people can’t make up their minds about anything. The danger is that they read something that somebody’s written, and they hang on to it. These people are called politicians. I wonder, with all politicians, whether they are genuinely sincere in what they’re saying. Ask them whether, before they got into positions of power, their views were the same. People are influenced an awful lot by others. They think, ‘If I say that, it’ll upset somebody.’”

This is hardly a thought that has ever detained Ecclestone unduly. Last July, he infamously declared that he would “take a bullet” for Vladimir Putin. The context was his personal relationship with the Russian president, whom he would be seen embracing each year at the race in Sochi. But the timing was so spectacularly bad, five months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that he was forced to issue the rarest of apologies. He has not conducted another interview since, until now. It helps explain why, when I inquire if there are any politicians he admires, he takes his time.

“Sorry for the long delay in replying,” he says, tapping his fingers. “I haven’t got long enough to think. Well, I was a big supporter of Mrs Thatcher. I thought she got on with things in the right way. Proper person. In fact, I spoke to her one day and told her that Max Mosley would be a good prime minister. And he would have been. Max would have said what he thought, without worrying about upsetting people. But he was always concerned that, because of his dad, he would have never got the support.”

It was indeed difficult to envisage Mosley, as the son of Sir Oswald, Britain’s most notorious fascist, rising to the highest office in the land. And yet as FIA president, he forged a memorable dynamic with Ecclestone, offsetting his opposite number’s icy image with a smooth, patrician charm. Ecclestone was distraught at Mosley’s death in 2021, likening it to “losing a brother”. Theirs, in his view, was a double act impossible to follow.

“When I was in the chair, we just never seemed to get into silly arguments about things. We sorted them out like you and I would. “What do you think of this idea?” Max would say to me. And I might respond that it didn’t sound that good. But it never got into the press. We weren’t discussing anything in front of an audience.”

Ecclestone is neither the nostalgic nor the reflective type. He has made countless daft remarks, once leaving human rights campaigners aghast by claiming that he would look into holding races in Syria or North Korea, but he leaves all the hue and cry behind instantly. “I worry about tomorrow,” he says. “There’s no point in trying to go over anything that happened yesterday. It’s finished.”

One episode that tested this resilience was the brutal suddenness of his Formula One ousting. He had imagined, even after the sport’s takeover six years ago by US media conglomerate Liberty Media, that he could carry on as the chief. Except Chase Carey, Liberty’s front man and once a key confidant to Rupert Murdoch, had other ideas.

“I appeared in my office at 10am and was presented with this document,” he recalls. “Chase said, ‘We’ve bought the company. And I want your job.’ I said, ‘Well, you’ve bought the car. You might as well drive it.’ They had already prepared a resignation letter for me, although I had a contract with myself, which had another three years to run. I said, ‘Give me the pen’ and I signed it. I didn’t read it. That was it.”

So far, so sanguine. But Ecclestone acknowledges for the first time that he felt disrespected by the exchange. “I like things to be done fairly. What was wrong was the way it was presented. It would have been nice for him to have sat down and said, “Bernie, are you happy continuing, because this is the sort of thing I’d like to do.” These guys wanted me to leave. They thought, ‘We Americans, for sure we can do a better job than he has.’” What about the bizarre “chairman emeritus” title that they briefly gave him as recompense? “Oh, they never spoke to me about anything. It was all about how they could justify getting me out.”

Fabiana, his wife, arrives at the hotel, resplendent in black fur coat and shades, with the couple’s two-year-old son Ace – short for Alexander Charles Ecclestone – in tow. They first met in 2009, when Fabiana, a Brazilian lawyer 46 years his junior, was working in Sao Paulo. The story since, as befitting Ecclestone’s penchant for living close to the edge, has seldom been light on drama. In 2014, she formed part of his defence team at a bribery trial in Germany. Two years later, her mother, Aparecida, was kidnapped in Brazil by an armed gang who, knowing her husband’s vast fortune, demanded a £28 million ransom. “My friends knew I wouldn’t pay a penny for a mother-in-law,” he later quipped, with his usual bone-dry wit.

Life is calmer now, against this backdrop of sylvan Swiss hills and snow-capped peaks. But he concedes that fatherhood has, at his time of life, proved a significant change of gear. After all, he already has three daughters – the eldest of whom, Deborah, is 67. Where Deborah maintains the lowest of profiles, Petra and Tamara, his two daughters with his second wife Slavica, have found a niche as reality TV stars with a reputation for extravagance, which extends to regular stints in Gstaad.

“We moved out here, more or less, when Covid started,” he reflects. “I haven’t thought about going back to the UK. The problem is that with the little one’s age, we need to start thinking, “Where is he going to go to school?” Therefore, we need to live whatever that is.” Gstaad, as home to Institut Le Rosey – the most expensive school in the world, with its own 38ft yacht – looks a logical choice. “Yeah, it’s supposed to be good. Parents send their kids from all over the world here. Although that might just be to get rid of them.”

In an intriguing link back to Ecclestone’s previous life, Fabiana is now working for Formula One, as the FIA’s vice-president in charge of South America. Is he ever tempted to impart his accumulated knowledge to her about how to solve problems? “I speak to the president, Mohammed [Ben Sulayem]. He gives me a call about different issues. I don’t tell Fabiana what to do.”

He is not shy of an opinion, mind, about Stefano Domenicali, his successor as F1’s figurehead. “Stefano has never been any closer to things beyond the fact that he once worked for Ferrari,” he scoffs. “Apart from that, he didn’t know what happened behind the scenes. I never had somebody beside me. I wasn’t a teacher. I didn’t ever intend to be.” He believes the only legitimate contender to inherit his mantle is Christian Horner, Red Bull’s team principal, who has stayed over the winter as his guest at Hotel Olden. “If you had to pick anyone today, I’d say he would be as good as there is. He listens well. He sorts out what’s rubbish from what isn’t.”

'When I'm gone, I'm gone... get some advertising money out of it'

It is time for lunch, at a venue that can only be reached by cable car. Club de Luge, a private club that he co-founded as a rival to Roger Moore’s favourite Eagle Restaurant atop the neighbouring mountain, is a giddyingly exclusive enclave, served by a dedicated gondola and where membership is by invitation only. At lunch we are joined by members of the Botin family, the most powerful dynasty in Spanish banking, who run Santander. On his way out of the restaurant, he catches up with a fellow billionaire, 84-year-old Laurence Graff, whose eponymous Gstaad boutique sells itself as “home to the most fabulous jewels in the world”. Through it all, Ace busies himself with his colouring book, oblivious to the extraordinary privilege into which he has been born.

Ecclestone, the son of a Suffolk trawlerman, has inhabited the realm of kings and queens, moguls and magnates, for so long that he can seem all but imperishable. But in his 93rd year, he suggests that he is at last contemplating his own mortality. It is not just that he spent the pandemic participating in an eight-part TV documentary about his life. It is the fact that he has even turned his attention to his funeral, and how stripped-down he would like it to be. Certainly, he has no appetite for any lachrymose tributes: “Pity they didn’t do those things when people were alive.”

“When I’m gone, I’m gone,” he reflects. “I told Fabiana a long time ago, ‘When I disappear, get a nice cardboard box, put me in the box, and put me in the oven. But before you do it, write DHL on the box and get some advertising money. That’s the way to do it.” The glint in the eye is back. Once the tycoon, always the tycoon. Truly, he is incorrigible.