BIOGRAPHY : No Angel: The Secret Life of Bernie EcclestoneBy Tom Bower Faber 417pp. £18.99
THE WISDOM OF George Orwell applies particularly aptly to Formula 1 motor racing. “Serious sport,” he wrote, “has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.” How many Formula 1 fans can honestly deny hoping for a 300km/h disaster to relieve the monotony of cars’ racing around for hours in circles?
Like the Olympic Games, motor racing has always exacerbated international rivalry and ill will. Apart from stimulating such ignoble passions, Formula 1 Grands Prix generate vast amounts of money, enriching the manufacturers of cars and the owners of racing circuits, racing teams and television rights.
The grandest prizes of all for four decades have been won by an extraordinarily wily, avaricious and, according to those who have known him best, unscrupulous entrepreneur, who, as he went along, invented most of the rules governing the least sporting of sports. As Bernie Ecclestone, the anti-hero of this unsavoury biography, amassed his first billion pounds he was already contriving to grab a second billion and more, while cheerfully acknowledging that in Formula 1 cheating is a way of life. When there were allegations that the president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) was allowing breaches of Formula 1 regulations, Bower writes, “the only person not noticeably excited was Ecclestone. ‘Nothing new,’ he said. ‘It’s all been going on for years.’ ”
Ecclestone was born in 1930, the son of a Suffolk fisherman who moved his family to Kent to find employment as a crane operator. Hard times, Bernie’s unaffectionate parents and his short stature – he never grew more than 159cm (5ft 2in) tall – moved him to hustle. As a child he delivered newspapers and, on his school playground, sold buns at a profit of 25 per cent, a modest mark-up compared with what was to come. His first experience of adult free enterprise was buying and selling used cars on Warren Street in London, an area noted for sharp practice and quick profits. He found natural progress in going on to Formula 1.
Most of this clever, amoral, rather tediously intricate book is about Ecclestone’s wheeling and dealing. He gave his biographer freedom to report all the details of bargaining that suggests similes such as labyrinthine, Byzantine and Machiavellian. Derogatory assessments did not upset him. To the contrary, Ecclestone has done everything possible to foster a reputation of cunning and ruthlessness to intimidate his business competitors.
He settled even some of his biggest, most complex contracts by word of mouth, with speed and brilliance that dazzled and dominated ordinary negotiators. He used the large number of organisations associated with motor racing to create further bewilderment to his advantage. Their acronyms – Foca, Foh, Fota and so on – infect the text like measles.
By 1991 Ecclestone manipulated the administrative chaos so astutely that he controlled Formula 1 with his collaborator and best friend, Max Mosley. They shared immense power and wealth, and continued to share it even when the News of the World, in its crusade against wickedness, revealed with a hidden camera that Mosley enjoyed sadomasochistic romps with prostitutes in German army uniform.
In spite of the scandal, which reminded the public that he is the son of the late Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of Britain’s prewar fascist party, Max withstood all efforts to force him to resign. Ecclestone stood by him, encouraging him to sue the paper for invasion of privacy, for which he was awarded £60,000.
Ecclestone experienced a comparable though less picturesque public-relations setback when he told two London Timesjournalists that his "favourite historical dictator" was Hitler. "In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was, in the way he could command a lot of people, able to get things done."
Ecclestone got things done so effectively that payments from teams such as Ferrari, McLaren and Williams and the proprietors of racing circuits and television companies made him one of the richest men in the world.
A compulsive gambler, he could lose £100,000 in a night of unlucky cards without turning a hair. His income greatly exceeded £1 million a week, and he preserved much of his wealth in an offshore family trust. Even during the recession revenues kept going up, profiting everyone involved, down to pit mechanics earning a mere £150,000 a year. Drivers have become multimillionaires, sometimes for only one season. Michael Schumacher's championships, for example, earned him well over £300 million. Ecclestone, maintaining his tough facade, called fatal crashes "a form of natural culling". It seems fitting that his mobile telephone answered with the theme tune from Clint Eastwood's western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
“Celebrities – kings, presidents, actors, models and pop stars – appeared at races,” Bower writes, “adding glamour to the daring and heroism,” and to themselves. Ecclestone has tried to make the most of his fortune, in luxurious homes and flitting around the world in his private jets. Slavica Malic, his second wife, is said to have modelled for nude photographs in Croatia before she met Bernie. At 188cm (6ft 2in) tall she normally towered over him – except, observers noted, when he stood on his wallet.
Patrick Skene Catling is the author of novels and books for children
