In the second part of our alphabetic Formula 1 icons series, I look back at one of the people who made F1 what it is now: Bernie Ecclestone.
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A British businessman at heart, he was the CEO of F1 until Liberty Media’s takeover in 2017. Some say he ruled with an iron fist and would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.
He and Max Moseley, his political partner, whatever your stance on them, made the sport what it is today.
Here’s all you need to know about Bernie Ecclestone:
Bernie Before Formula 1
Bernard ‘Bernie’ Ecclestone was born in 1930 to an average working family in Suffolk, UK. While he was not rich, he knew how to make a deal.
This all started at school, where he would trade items he had for more and negotiate with his friends on getting the best deal. While odd, it’s what made him the negotiator we know now.
He was introduced to motorsport in 1946 through motorbikes at Brands Hatch during his time at university. The business of racing instantly interested him.
After university, Bernie worked at a gas plant but kept browsing the classifieds looking for motorbikes to sell. Soon, he was able to open a motorbike dealership in London that started outselling traditional shops in the area.
While never into driving competitively, Bernie raced a Formula 3 Cooper Climax car before an accident at Brands Hatch threw him into the car park. He stopped racing after that crash.
His businesses kept growing, and he became wealthy after investing his money in real estate and keeping his dealerships open. On the side, he was a driver manager for Stuart-Lewis-Evans and Jochen Rindt before his death in 1970.
Bernie Ecclestone in the Brabham Years
During the 1971 season, Ron Tauranac, Brabham team principal, offered for Bernie to buy the team. He paid $100,000 for it and became the CEO for the 1972 season.
Quickly, he vouched for more team control of Formula 1. The FIA had a lot more power back then, and he wanted to change that as teams struggled to pay for the racing.
He set up the Formula One Constructors Association, FOCA, to fight the FIA and its favouritism of Ferrari and the big teams. The British teams liked this idea and supported him.
Brabham itself was also doing well on track. Gordon Murray, a legendary F1 designer, joined the team and created the quickly-banned Brabham BT46B. The car had a fan that would suck it to the ground, and air would come out the back.
While Niki Lauda won with ease, the other teams complained to the FIA about the stones coming out the rear of the car, and it was outlawed after one race.
Under Bernie’s leadership, the team won two championships. One in 1981 with Nelson Piquet and the other in 1983, which was the first turbocharged car to win the championship.
Nelson Piquet left the team in 1985 to join Williams, and the results stagnated. Bernie then sold the team in 1988 for $5 million, a lot more than he paid for it!
CEO of FOCA and F1
While owning a team is hard enough, he was also the leader of FOCA. In 1978, as the leader of FOCA, he realised F1’s huge marketing and commercial power and started bargaining with promoters for TV rights.
He knew how lucrative Formula 1 was and used that to negotiate with people when staging F1 races. Partnered with Max Moseley, a lawyer, they had the power to strongarm promoters into getting what they wanted.
They had made enemies within the FIA, though. Jean-Marie Baluster, president of the FIA at the time, was a vocal critic of FOCA as Bernie believed he was favouring the European teams.
Baluster banned side skirts, a purely British innovation, and this led to huge dismay within the paddock. Clearly, something had to be done to stop the FIA ruling the sport with an iron fist.
What came next was F1’s first Concord Agreement in 1981—a mandate for how the teams (and the FIA) had to share funds and tightened the technical regulations.
The Concord Agreement was a big step in unifying the grid. Most teams didn’t struggle to put cars on the grid and could confidently complete a season.
Crucially though, it gave Bernie and Max a seat at the FIA’s committee. Bernie took control of the commercial rights to F1, and it saw a massive boost in popularity in the late 80s. The sport kept growing, with the Concord agreement being updated when new technical regulations came in.
He sold Formula 1 to Liberty Media in 2017 for $4.4 billion dollars. He was initially unhappy with the sale, citing that he had built a ‘five-star restaurant’ and Liberty Media wanted to make a ‘fried chicken place.’
Why is Bernie Ecclestone so important?
The sport wouldn’t be the same without him. He grew Formula 1 by recognising the global outreach it had. While he made many people, including himself, very wealthy in the process, it grew F1 to the scale we know it today.
Bernie was also one for gossip and politics. He thought that they made for better viewing figures and created controversy to boost popularity.
Major manufacturers joined as they also realised the marketing power that Formula 1 had. While Bernie didn’t coin the phrase ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’, he certainly made car makers realise that it was actually true.
Safety was also deeply important to him, and he worked with F1 chief mechanic Sid Watkins to create safer cars and tracks. A lot of this work came after Ayrton Senna’s untimely death at Imola in 1994.
Put simply, he grew Formula One by making people realise the marketing opportunities that were presented through its global scale.
94-year-old Bernie is also selling his private F1 car collection at the moment. Any nerds, like me, should definitely check it out. It’s full of incredible history.
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Get 10% off all official F1 Merch at TheRaceWorks.com using code ‘EF1‘ at checkout.