Let’s face it: anything is better than Bernie Ecclestone, who used to say that money didn’t matter but was “just a way of keeping score”. Nobody believed him. The cash he extracted from Formula One over four decades of close involvement paid for the vast ski chalet in Gstaad, the villa on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda, the ranch in Brazil, the executive jet, the lifestyles of his remarkable daughters – one living in a £75m house in Kensington Palace Gardens, the other in a $85m mansion in the hills above Los Angeles – and a £740m divorce from their mother. Not to mention the €100m paid into a German court in 2014 to avoid a trial on a charge of bribery, which still left him with a fortune estimated at more than £2bn.
So money mattered, just a bit, and Ecclestone became the living symbol of a sport that seemed to have more than it knew what to do with. The first time I interviewed him, on the eve of the 1982 season, he was inhabiting a London penthouse with double-height rooms across the river from Tate Britain. He told me that the sport would bankrupt itself within two years if a cap were not put on its expenditure. As would become increasingly apparent, Ecclestone’s motive for telling other people to spend less money was the belief it would mean more of the stuff for him.
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