F1 is the empire Bernie Ecclestone built but can it thrive without him?

Retirement, one suspects, will not come easily to Bernie Ecclestone. Having been removed on Monday as the chief executive of Formula One, the 86-year-old has already just experienced the shock of facing a decision that could not be turned in favour of his intractable will. As a result of it, he suddenly finds himself on the sidelines and left impotent within the empire he created. For almost 40 years Ecclestone was the driving force behind F1’s commercial success but must now, finally, take a back seat.

Though Ecclestone was often as controversial as he was successful at making money, the sport’s new owners, Liberty Media, are banking that he is not so pivotal to the business as it appeared. How both he and the sport emerge from the departure will make for interesting times.

The son of a trawlerman from Suffolk, Ecclestone’s career began with him selling second-hand motorcycle parts. It may now have concluded with him being moved into the honorary role of chairman emeritus after the business he largely forged was sold to Liberty for a remarkable £6.4bn. He has many detractors and many faults but Formula One largely owes its success to him.

In the 1970s, when Ecclestone was running the Brabham team, F1 was a popular sport but faced competition from other branches of motor racing and was still run commercially on a largely amateur basis. In 1974 he, alongside several other team principals including Frank Williams, Colin Chapman and Ken Tyrell formed the Formula One Constructors’ Association to represent their interests with particular focus on television rights. What followed transformed the sport. Ecclestone went on to take the haphazard and ad-hoc televising of races and sell the lot as a championship.

Broadcasters had to take every race, the exposure helped the sport expand and sponsorship money followed the airtime. Teams were bankrolled properly and what might once have been seen as a niche sport for petrolheads turned into the prime time worldwide attraction of the F1 circus.

And Ecclestone knew the value of his personal big top. With allies in the FIA, competing formulas such as the sports cars of the late 80s were seen off and the sport became the only globally-recognised racing series in the world. In 2001 he bought the commercial rights for 100 years from the FIA for, what by any standard, was the grossly undervalued price of $360m. The global exposure fuelled demand for more races, with countries queuing up to pay increasingly huge fees to host grands prix for promotional and public relations purposes. Two years after he bought the rights the sport’s income was $729m. In 2015 it was $1.8bn.

The numbers were good enough (and Ecclestone has always enjoyed large numbers preceded by dollar signs) to make F1 a sport that was also a business worth buying – hence previous owners CVC, a private equity group who purchased it in 2006 and had made an $8.2bn return on their investment by 2014, and now Liberty. Ecclestone was key to this but it should be noted it was not a process that happened in a vacuum.

The deal to buy the rights from the FIA was done with Ecclestone’s long-time ally and associate Max Mosley and has subsequently come under considerable criticism. It was exceptional for Ecclestone and any subsequent owners but not for the sport’s governing body.

His rule has always been authoritarian. “Things happen quickly and you need decisions quickly,” he once said. “You can’t have a bloody board meeting to decide everything.” Business was conducted in private and subject to his personal negotiation before only being revealed to the F1 world when the ink was dry and the cheque cashed.

For many there was no problem with this approach. When he sold the UK TV rights to Sky in 2011, there was outrage from fans but nary a peep from the teams who immediately recognised that their share of income would increase as a result. The same logic applied to his increasing of the number of races and the move to new markets willing to pay exorbitant hosting fees: China and the middle east, and controversial venues like Azerbaijan and Bahrain.

All of which has come with a price not quantified in dollars. Classic venues such as Silverstone and Spa are struggling to meet the cost of hosting F1 and risk dropping off the calendar. The full shift of rights to Sky in the UK in 2019 has angered fans and could compromise the long-term popularity of the sport with no races to be shared with terrestrial television as is currently the arrangement.

There have been mistakes, too, and of significant importance. The prize money allocation system he created is biased against smaller teams and threatens their future but the governance system he introduced can do nothing about it. The strategy group that now makes the rules in F1 is run by the teams themselves, the majority of whom will never voluntarily vote themselves a pay cut in favour of the minnows. This in turn has also led to a sporting formula dictated by teams and in which Ecclestone was increasingly powerless to intervene. Efforts to do so such as the double points for the final race in 2014 and the revamped qualifying format of 2016 were hugely unpopular and swiftly abandoned.

Absolutely central to the Ecclestone role in F1 has always been the concept that he, personally, is indispensable. “Without Bernie, F1 doesn’t exist. It’s as simple as that,” as Flavio Briatore observed. But while that was once the case as he built the empire, the evidence seems less compelling now – or certainly Liberty believe that to be the case. They have stated that they want to promote the sport aggressively to new audiences, engage with social media and support its rich heritage at classic venues. Ecclestone, who has kept the money coming in but also overseen a drop in global viewing figures from 600m to 400m since 2008, is increasingly out of step with those aims.

Liberty’s success will depend on Ecclestone’s replacements. The commercial operation will now be handled by Sean Bratches, the former ESPN executive vice-president of sales and marketing. He has expertise in digital media and distribution and his appointment is a clear sign that business will now be done in the accepted corporate US style. He and the numbers he generates will put to the test the truth of Ecclestone being indispensable.

On the sporting side appointing the former team principal Ross Brawn, who won 19 world titles during his time with Williams, Benetton, Ferrari and his own BrawnGP team, can only be applauded. Brawn’s knowledge and insight into F1 is second to none and he has a genuine love of the sport. “We have an almost unprecedented opportunity to work together with the teams and promoters for a better F1 for them and, most importantly, for the fans,” Brawn said on his appointment. Many of those fans will be hugely pleased to see the back of the Ecclestone era and, for the moment, can have cause for optimism in what the new boys will do with the business Bernie built.