Bernie Ecclestone enjoys his reputation as a hardnosed, enormously wealthy and tremendously powerful business tycoon, who is a crushingly competent and adventurous entrepreneur. He is the billionaire powerbroker who almost unaided steered Formula One onto its current stage as a sensational global cash machine. How did this man get his start and what drives this 72-year old to dizzying heights?

Bernie, the early years
Bernie Ecclestone was born in Ipswitch in 1930. Ecclestone, a wheeling and dealing teenager, left school at the age of 16 and began to race motorbikes in the immediate postwar era. Ecclestone’s father helped him out when he started racing motorbikes after extracting a promise from him that he’d go back to study chemistry. Ecclestone kept his promise and received a degree in chemical engineering from Woolwich Polytechnic in southeast London.

While working in the chemistry lab of a gasworks, Ecclestone bought and sold motorcycles during his lunchtime. He progressed to working in a motorbike dealership in Bexleyheath (where he grew up) and, with the shop owner and Fred Compton set up Compton & Ecclestone, which grew to become one of Britain’s largest motorcycle dealerships. Ecclestone bought out Compton’s interest in the business, then the owners’. He expanded into cars, hire purchase, and car auctions.

Ecclestone, a maverick and risk-taker by nature, then became a racecar driver. However, an accident brought his driving career to a quick halt. At the age of 27, Ecclestone refocused his energy into managing the Connaught Formula One Team. However, following the death of his friend, Stuart Lewis Evans in the Monaco Grand Prix the following year, Ecclestone left the sport. Ecclestone didn’t spend much time away from Formula One, though. In the late 1960s he returned to racing and in 1970, he bought the Brabbham team. In 1972, Ecclestone and Max Mosley (manager of the rival team) set up the Formula One Constructors Association.

Formula One Promotions
Ecclestone is credited with setting Formula One on its fortnightly track. Television broadcasters were immediately drawn to the regularity of Formula One's schedule. With the attraction of big money to Formula One racing, Ecclestone was off and running.
Bernie Ecclestone announced his planned floatation (public offering) of Formula One Promotions & Administration (FOPA) in March 1997. However, by September 1998, FOPA the public flotation was scupperred in favor of a US $2 billion Eurobond issue secured against FOPA’s future cash flows. While Ecclestone had no personal interest in the bond issue proceeds, his wife, Slavica, was the principal beneficiary. Ecclestone’s overriding concern is that after his death no one will be capable of running FOPA as he’d like. Ecclestone structured these transactions to reap maximum value for his family, although with the bond offering the ownership of FOPA is controlled by a group of trustees, something that displeases Ecclestone.

In May 1999, Formula One Promotions & Administration signed a contract with Brands Hatch Leisure to hold the British Brand Prix in Kent for six years beginning in 2002. It is reported that Brands Hatch Leisure paid £11.5 million plus a 10% share of the gate receipts for the contract. The British Grand Prix had been held for the previous 18 years at the British Racing Drivers’ Club’s Silverstone circuit in Northamptonshire.

Following this iniquitous move, in June 1999, the European Commission published findings from its two-year investigation into international motor-sport. The report charged the organizers and promoters (primarily Ecclestone) of exploiting their dominance of the sport. The report was followed one month later by a formal apology to Bernie Ecclestone and the Federation International de L’Automobile for disclosing the details of the EU’s investigation into Formula One operations.

The ‘Bernie’
Ecclestone loves Formula One - that is clear. He instituted the ‘Bernie’, a sort of Formula 1 Oscar in the form of a gold statute of Bernie Ecclestone, himself. In 2001, he handed out four - a Lifetime Achievement award to Murray Walker, and three others given to Michael Schumacher, Professor Sid Watkins and Jenson Button for his magnificent rookie year in 2000.

Bernie speaks out - contradicting charges that Formula One’s become boring
The Guardian ran an exclusive interview with Bernie Ecclestone in its May 5, 2002 edition. It opened with a quote from Ecclestone, “We are not communists. There is no way we are all equal.”

While on this occasion, he was speaking of Formula One teams; Ecclestone is not a believer in equality. In response to comments that Formula One has become boring, and the same teams and drivers win, Ecclestone remarked, “Teams aren’t equal. Some get more money compared to others that are lazy, and other teams are not so competitive. The teams that are winning have people who run them who are super-competitive. Simple as that.”

Besides being criticized as boring, Formula One also seems to have abandoned the art of overtaking, which to the outsider is the point of the sport. Ecclestone dismisses the cry that F1 has progressed from a gripping competition between the worlds’ best drivers into a mere question of cars and technology. Ecclestone’s retort to these arguments is that Formula One is more subtle and sophisticated; like a “football match with no goals.” He views it as a package; noting that now Ferrari has the best package - the best car, engine, tires, and certainly the best driver. He also knows that radical change is not for Formula One and therefore dismisses suggestions that would rock the sport.

What about Michael Schumacher’s brilliant career? Ecclestone insists that every sport has its “One” and for F1, Michael is the current One. Michael motivates the Ferrari team. Compare that to boxing at its peak - Muhammad Ali was The One and people were waiting to see who was going to beat him. In tennis, Bjorn Borg was unbeatable at his peak, yet the fans knew someone else would come along and beat him. “People like to see a superstar, and then see who is going to beat him.” The way Ecclestone sees it, the interest in F1 is about who is going to beat Michael. Each race offers fresh possibility that someone will beat Michael.

When asked if he has Formula One heroes, he lamented, “I was close to the people who drove for me or were in some way associated with me. People like Rindt, Lauda, Senna, Pace and Petersen; they were all characters. Today, it doesn’t seem, at least driver-wise, that you have the characters we used to have. I don’t know why that is - whether they’re under too much pressure, whether they’re earning too much money.” He acknowledged that he might be partially guilty for this change by bringing order and discipline to the sport and, in doing so, blocking the way for some mavericks.

The personal side of Bernie
Ecclestone, only 5’ 4” in height, married late, in his fifties, to Slavica, a Croatian and former Armani model who is 6’ 2” tall and 28 years his junior. They have two daughters, Tamara, 18, and Petra, 14. The family home is in Chelsea Square, London, and Ecclestone boasts that he is home with his family as much as most people. He’s proud of the fact that he personally drives his daughters to school.

Ecclestone is not your culturally well-rounded billionaire- he doesn’t like the theater, doesn’t listen to music, and found the Bolshoi ballet uninspiring. He is fond of certain films, like the Bond films, the Godfather, and Pretty Woman. He firmly insists that he does not like movies with a message in them!

Bernie Ecclestone is reputed to be one of the richest men in Britain. According to Forbes magazine, his net worth is $3 billion. Time magazine thinks it's nearer $4 billion and The Sunday Times named Bernie and Slavica as the UK's richest married couple, as well as the fastest risers, topping the charts at £3 billon. That makes him the third richest in the UK. He and his companies own Biggin Hill airfield in Kent, a grand prix racetrack in the south of France, a number of properties in and around London and in Switzerland, where he owns a house in the upmarket resort of Gstaad. There are yachts, planes, and cars. And if it all goes terribly wrong, according to Forbes he can fall back on a $1 billion family trust.

Secret donations and advertising bans
And then there’s the highly controversial 1996 ‘secret’ £1 million donation from Ecclestone to the Labour Party, which was then in opposition and preparing to fight the general election that came in May 1997. A few months later, his donation became public knowledge, and the revelation caused uproar in Parliament, as it came just months after the party had made a policy U-turn on the issue of lifting the restraints on tobacco sponsorship within Formula One. As a result, Tony Blair was forced to fend off Tory attempts to link the two; a situation that ended in the Labour Party publicly handing the donation back to Ecclestone, but not before Tony Blair had a meeting with Ecclestone, after which exemptions from the smoking advertisement ban were floated for Formula One racing.

Say what you will. Bernie is one of a select group who has constructed and shaped Formula One into the sport it is today. He does not intend to quit now. The road forward may not be clear, but there’s no doubt it will be interesting as long as Ecclestone’s behind the wheel.