As F1 visits Sochi, Putin embraces platform it creates

time that a surface-to-air missile was responsible and blamed pro-Russian rebels; evidence released by Dutch investigators was consistent with the assertion of a missile attack.

The crash, which killed 298 people, gave impetus to demands across the world for stricter sanctions against Russia, which extended to calls for the cancellation of the Russian Grand Prix, a race that has been part of Ecclestone’s own bid to push south and east, with Formula One.

For more than a decade, Ecclestone has been busy tying up lucrative deals to stage races with governments outside Formula One’s traditional sphere in Western Europe and, more controversially, in countries with deep state coffers but only a nodding acquaintance with Western notions of democracy and human rights.

Ecclestone has unceremoniously dropped races in countries like France, where the first grand prix was held in 1906, and embraced new host nations across the Middle East and Asia that have been eager for the prestige associated with the high-technology carnival of Formula One, and for the shop window provided by a TV audience of hundreds of millions.

Abu Dhabi, China and Bahrain have been on the roster for years, and Russia, in the negotiations overseen by Putin, pledged to pay a reported $40 million a year to stage races in Sochi for seven years. That, and the building of a track to Ecclestone’s specifications, is part of a wider plan to sustain the $1.5 billion in revenue Ecclestone husbands each year, the largest chunk of it retained by the London-based investment company CVC Capital Partners, the sport’s majority owner.

Ecclestone faced a minor revolt within Formula One over the Russian race when Ari Vatanen, a former world rally champion and a senior official of motor sports’ world governing body, called for the Sochi race to be scrapped to keep Formula One from appearing to condone the Russian aggression in Ukraine.

But Ecclestone held firm. A self-professed admirer of strong leaders who once apologized for describing Adolf Hitler as a man who was “able to get things done,” he has listed the former Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev — with whom he negotiated unsuccessfully for a race around the Kremlin in the 1980s — among the men he most admires.

He has listed Putin, too, in that category, telling a Moscow-based business newspaper, Vedomosti, in an interview published last week that he viewed Putin as “a firstclass man” and suggesting that Putin could run Europe or America, “but I think he’s busy.”