Bernie Ecclestone ran Formula One for four decades, and the way he held it is the story. Control of the commercial rights sat in one pair of hands. In October 2023 the same hands signed up to pay HM Revenue and Customs more than £650 million in back taxes and penalties, after a tax fraud conviction at Southwark Crown Court. The sentence was 17 months in prison, suspended for two years.
From motorcycle parts to the paddock
Bernard Charles Ecclestone was born in 1930 in St Peter South Elmham, a Suffolk hamlet, the son of a fisherman, Sidney, and his wife Bertha Sophia. The family moved to Bexleyheath in southeast London in 1938. At 16 he left Dartford West Central Secondary School for a job in a gasworks chemical laboratory. After the war he went into trading motorcycle spare parts.
He tried driving first. He started in Formula Three in 1949 and won several races at Brands Hatch in a Cooper Mk V. In 1958 he bought two Connaught chassis to enter the Monaco and British Grands Prix as a privateer, and failed to qualify for either. So he moved to the other side of the garage, managing Stuart Lewis-Evans and later Jochen Rindt, who won the 1970 drivers’ title posthumously.
In 1972 he bought Brabham and ran it for 15 years. The team took 22 wins and two drivers’ titles with Nelson Piquet. Two years after the purchase he co-founded the Formula One Constructors’ Association and steered it through the FISA-FOCA war.
Owning the rights
Follow the money and it leads to television. Ecclestone pioneered selling the sport’s broadcast rights in the late 1970s. Under the 1987 Concorde Agreement he and his companies also controlled the administration, setup and logistics of every Grand Prix. He founded the Formula One Group that same year.
Elsewhere, his International Sportsworld Communicators held the commercial rights to the World Rally Championship from 1996 to 2000. He placed fifth on the Sunday Times Rich List in 2002 and turned down both a CBE and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. From 2007 to 2011 he co-owned Queens Park Rangers with Flavio Briatore, and the club won promotion to the Premier League in that time.
The handover to Liberty
He sold the Formula One Group to Liberty Media in 2017. He stayed on as chairman emeritus and adviser to the board until 2020.
Christian Horner, the sacked Red Bull team principal, offered his reading in an Autosport interview on YouTube. Asked whether his own exit resembled Ecclestone’s, he rejected a direct comparison. “He didn’t believe in digital media and something like Netflix would have never happened in Bernie’s time because digital media didn’t pay and Netflix weren’t paying a big enough fee,” Horner said. Liberty, he added, “saw an opportunity with the sport to take it to its next level.”
His own case, Horner said, was different. Red Bull sacked him in July 2025 after 20 years, a run that brought eight drivers’ and six constructors’ titles. He suggested the company wanted a new direction and may have thought he had too much influence, and said things changed after founder Dietrich Mateschitz died in October 2022. Red Bull, he said, became “a lot more committee and corporately driven.” Laurent Mekies replaced him.
Ecclestone’s own later years drew other headlines. When his son was born in 2020, he was 89, one of the oldest known fathers. The tax case followed three years later, and the £650 million deal with HMRC.
Sources
- Bernie Ecclestone
- Inside the making of Netflix’s Schumacher ’94
- Christian Horner: Red Bull thought I had too much influence after Dietrich Mateschitz died
Photo: Ryan Bayona (CC BY 2.0)
