I’M LEAVING FOR SWITZERLAND
After 80 years in London and 9 months on from being ousted as F1 supremo, Bernie Ecclestone reveals...
It’s a wrench. h. I didn’t choose se to go – I just got fired The new owners haven’t done anything yet. All they do is talk
BAD news for the milkman whose delivery has long been a daily staple at Bernie Ecclestone’s Knightsbridge office. The order is off. The boss is moving.
For sportsmail can reveal that, after 80 years in London, Ecclestone is on the verge of relocating to Gstaad, Switzerland, to start a new life in the mountains with his Brazilian wife, Fabiana. They plan to up sticks in the new year.
‘We are just setting things up,’ said Formula One’s one-time overlord, who turns 87 later this month. ‘I have had Swiss residency for nearly 30 years. The intention ages ago was that I would build a house there and move the F1 company abroad, but I couldn’t get all the people I needed to leave England.
‘That’s the reason I stayed. But now I don’t care about that. I can just go over there and live. I will take a few members of staff, but not many.
‘I will still come back to London from time to time, to see friends. I will also spend more time in Brazil, where we have a coffee farm. But Switzerland will be my main home.’
He intends to sell his slim office block opposite Hyde Park, bought from Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in 1985, and where he lives behind dark windows ‘above the shop’ in a modest penthouse.
Ecclestone is renovating his Hotel Olden in Gstaad, andd owns a nearby glacier. Thesese concerns, and the coffee farmrm near Sao Paulo, are preoccupyinging him since he lost control of his life’s work — Formula One — earlier this year, when Americancan conglomerate Liberty Media paidaid £6billion for the business.
I ask Ecclestone if leaving London, and all its creature comforts, will be a wrench. ‘Yeah,’ he fires back immediately, before adding with poignant understatement: ‘It’s a bit of a wrench not being involved in Formula One… but you get used to it.’
The stunning news of his enforced departure was delivered in January. He recalls how Chase Carey, Liberty’s hirsute new F1 boss, broke the news to him — a moment of sporting history that swept aside the last of the old oligarchs, a man who wanted to leave the grand prix world in his coffin, with some sponsorship on the side.
‘I didn’t choose to leave — I was fired,’ said Ecclestone, revealing the details of the fateful conversation for the first time. ‘ Chase called me on the Sunday, and said, “Can I see you tomorrow?” He said he’d come to the office. I said, “Yeah, I’ll be there.”
‘ He said, “You know we completed the deal on Friday?” ‘I said, “Yes, congratulations.”
‘He said, “I need you to stand down as chief executive. That’s the job I want.”.
‘I said he had bought the car and might as well drive it. I resigned. They had all the documents on them for me to do that. It was a surprise because I was told they wanted me to stay on a three-year contract. I could have made a bit of a fuss, but I didn’t.
‘If the boot had been on the other foot, I would not have done it the way they did it. They would have been better off working with me for six months and seeing how it went. Anyway, they elevated me to such a high position in the company that I can’t see what’sw going on.’
Since then Ecclestone, although busy helping those friends who seek his help believing he now has time to b be of assistance, has only at attended a handful of races thi this season. The last one was Aus Austria in July; the next one will bbe Brazil on November 12. Plac Places have been reserved for him in the Mercedes and Red Bull motor motorhomes, but the message from LLiberty is heard loud and clear: stay away.
‘Chase sent a message to one of the girls in the office to tell me that they haven’t got so many offices at the circuits — only what the race promoter gives them,’ said Ecclestone. ‘There are three of them (Carey, commercial director Sean Bratches and technical director Ross Brawn) so the three offices are being used. So basically they don’t want me to come to races. It would have been just as easy to have said that to me. Anyway, I have obliged them.’
Ecclestone now mostly watches the races at home with Fabiana, 40, for company. He has enjoyed the season’s title tussle, between his backgammon-playing Ferrari friend Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton. ‘Lewis will win it in Austin next race,’ predicted Ecclestone of the Brit who leads the standings by 59 points with four races remaining. ‘ He has driven superbly this season, while Ferrari awoke and then fell asleep.’
Ecclestone has now sold his last remaining shares in Formula One, ending an association stretching across five decades. The final tranche has added £300millionplus to his fortune of several, untold, billions.
He makes no comment on the long-term vision of the new owners. ‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ is the gist of it, though noting that their stride into social media was not his thing: it would disrupt the TV rights deals on which the business was predicated.
But this he does say. ‘ They haven’t done anything yet as far as I can see. They said they wouldn’t talk, they would act. They said I talked before doing anything. I didn’t. I got things done quietly. All they do is talk. They said they wanted six races in America, for example.
‘If I say I am going to whack someone next time I see them, I’d better bloody well do it. Chase had preconceived ideas of what needed to be done. But now he’s on board, it isn’t quite as easy as he thought. So I feel sorry for him.’
There is no grave danger of selfpity with Ecclestone, but he is a very human individual. And when I ask what he misses most after a lifetime in Formula One, he says: ‘People. The people who became friends. Nice people.’