Where this was said
Bernie's Entrance
At 32:56 · chapter starts 30:43
Bernie Ecclestone was born in 1930 in Suffolk, the son of a commercial fisherman, and made his first fortune hawking surplus war vehicles in London before becoming the celebrity car guy for newly rich Londoners — the person you called for a Ferrari or a Bugatti. He was also rumored, delightedly by himself, to have masterminded the 1963 Great Train Robbery (£2.6 million stolen). When asked about it in 2005, he replied, 'There wasn't enough money on that train for me to be involved. I could have done something bigger.' He drifted into F1 as an agent for drivers, then in 1972 bought the Brabham team for £100,000 after his star client Jochen Rindt — who would win the Drivers' Championship posthumously that year, the only driver ever to do so — was killed in a crash. Surveying the landscape of nine F1 teams, Bernie noted that all of them except Ferrari had no money and no business sense. Every race was negotiated separately, team by team; there was no central television deal. It was, he recognized immediately, a void of power waiting to be filled.
Bernie Ecclestone centralized F1's chaotic commercial rights, took 8% off the top instead of the 2% he promised, secured 100-year commercial rights in a no-bid process, and extracted billions — all without ever formally owning the sport. Eddie Jordan's summary is still the best: 'He sold it four times, never bought it back, never lost control, and never owned it in the first place.'
