Ecclestone was born on 28 October 1930 in St Peter South Elmham, a hamlet south of Bungay, Suffolk. He was the son of Sidney Ecclestone, a fisherman, and his wife Bertha Sophia, née Westley. He attended primary school in Wissett, Suffolk, before the family moved to Danson Road, Bexleyheath, in southeast London, in 1938. He was not evacuated to the countryside during the Second World War and remained with his family.
Ecclestone left Dartford West Central Secondary School at the age of 16 to work as an assistant in the chemical laboratory at the local gasworks, testing gas purity. He also studied chemistry at Woolwich Polytechnic and pursued his hobby of motorcycles.
Immediately after the Second World War, Ecclestone went into business trading in spare parts for motorcycles and formed the Compton & Ecclestone motorcycle dealership with Fred Compton. His first racing experience came in 1949 in the 500cc Formula 3 series, and he acquired a Cooper Mk V in 1951. He drove only a limited number of races, mainly at his local circuit, Brands Hatch, achieving a number of good placings and an occasional win. He initially retired from racing following several accidents at Brands Hatch, intending to focus on his business interests, which included property, loan financing and the Weekend Car Auctions firm.
Ecclestone returned to racing in 1957 as manager of driver Stuart Lewis-Evans, and purchased two chassis from the disbanded Connaught Formula One team. He entered these two cars at the 1958 Monaco Grand Prix, where 30 cars competed for 16 places on the grid; his drivers Bruce Kessler and Paul Emery were too slow to make the field and complained about handling problems. Ecclestone drove one of the cars himself to verify the statements and recorded a time nearly a minute slower than his drivers, an attempt since described as "not a serious attempt". He also entered the British Grand Prix that year, but the car was raced by Jack Fairman. When Lewis-Evans suffered severe burns after his engine exploded at the 1958 Moroccan Grand Prix and died six days later, Ecclestone was shocked and again retired from racing.
His friendship with Roy Salvadori led to his becoming manager of driver Jochen Rindt and a partial owner of Rindt's 1970 Lotus Formula 2 team, whose other driver was Graham Hill. Rindt died in a crash at the Monza circuit while on his way to the 1970 World Championship, which he was awarded posthumously.
During the 1971 season, Ecclestone was approached by Ron Tauranac, owner of the Brabham team, who was looking for a business partner. Ecclestone offered £100,000 for the whole team, which Tauranac eventually accepted. Tauranac stayed on as designer and to run the factory, but he and Ecclestone were both dominant personalities, and Tauranac left Brabham early in the 1972 season. The team achieved little during 1972 as Ecclestone reshaped it; he abandoned the customer car production business established by Jack Brabham and Tauranac, reasoning that to compete at the front in Formula One a team must concentrate all its resources there.
For the 1973 season, Ecclestone promoted Gordon Murray to chief designer. Murray produced the triangular cross-section BT42, the first of a series of Ford-powered cars with which Brabham took several victories in 1974 and 1975 with Carlos Reutemann and Carlos Pace. Ecclestone then signed a deal with Alfa Romeo to use its powerful but heavy flat-12 engine from the 1976 season; the new BT45s were unreliable and overweight, and Brabham fell towards the back of the field in 1976 and 1977 before winning two races in 1978, when Ecclestone signed double world champion Niki Lauda and ran Murray's radical BT46 design.
The Brabham-Alfa era ended in 1979, the team's first season with the young Brazilian Nelson Piquet; when Alfa Romeo began testing its own Formula One car, Ecclestone reverted to Cosworth DFV engines. Piquet formed a close, long-lasting relationship with Ecclestone and the team, losing the title narrowly to Alan Jones in 1980 and winning it in 1981 and 1983. Brabham tested a BMW turbo-engined car in the summer of 1981, and after reliability and driveability issues were resolved, the turbo car took its first win at the 1982 Canadian Grand Prix and the first turbo-powered world championship in 1983.
The team remained competitive until 1985. Piquet left after seven years, unhappy with the money Ecclestone was willing to offer, and went to Williams, where he won his third championship. Murray, who since 1973 had designed cars that scored 22 Grand Prix wins, left in 1986 to join McLaren. Brabham continued under Ecclestone to the end of the 1987 season, scoring only eight points, and BMW withdrew from Formula One after that season. Having bought the team for approximately $120,000 at the end of 1971, Ecclestone sold it for over US$5 million to a Swiss businessman, Joachim Luhti, in 1988.
In parallel with his activities as a team owner, Ecclestone formed the Formula One Constructors' Association (FOCA) in 1974 with Frank Williams, Colin Chapman, Teddy Mayer, Ken Tyrrell and Max Mosley. He became increasingly involved with FISA and FOCA in the 1970s, particularly in negotiating the sport's television rights. He became chief executive of FOCA in 1978 with Mosley as his legal adviser; together they negotiated a series of legal issues with the FIA and Jean-Marie Balestre, culminating in Ecclestone's securing the right for FOCA to negotiate television contracts for the Grands Prix. He established Formula One Promotions and Administration, giving 47% of television revenues to teams, 30% to the FIA and 23% to FOPA; in return, FOPA put up the prize money.
Television rights shuffled between Ecclestone's companies, the teams and the FIA in the late 1990s, but Ecclestone emerged on top again in 1997 when he negotiated the fourth Concorde Agreement, maintaining the television rights in exchange for annual payments. Under the terms of the Concorde Agreement in 1987, Ecclestone and his companies also controlled the administration, setup and logistics of each Formula One Grand Prix.
In 1978, Ecclestone hired Sid Watkins as official Formula One medical doctor. Following the crash at the 1978 Italian Grand Prix, Watkins demanded better safety measures, which were provided at the next race, and Formula One began to improve safety over the following decades. Despite heart surgery and a triple coronary bypass in 1999, Ecclestone remained energetic in promoting his business interests, reducing his share in SLEC Holdings to 25% in the late 1990s while retaining complete control of the companies.
In October 2004, Ecclestone and British Racing Drivers' Club president Jackie Stewart were unable to come to terms over the future British Grand Prix, causing the race to be dropped from the 2005 provisional calendar before a contract was signed on 9 December to guarantee its continuation for five years. In mid-November 2004, the three banks comprising Speed Investments — Bayerische Landesbank, J.P. Morgan Chase and Lehman Brothers — sued Ecclestone for more control over the sport. On 6 December 2004, Justice Andrew Park ruled in favour of the banks, but Ecclestone insisted the verdict would mean "nothing at all" and stated his intention to appeal. In November 2005, CVC Capital Partners announced it would purchase Ecclestone's shares and Bayerische Landesbank's share; through Alpha Prema, CVC increased its ownership of Formula One to 86% by December 2005, with the EU competition authorities approving the transaction in March 2006 subject to CVC selling Dorna.
Ecclestone was removed from his position as chief executive of the Formula One Group on 23 January 2017, following its takeover by Liberty Media in 2016. He was appointed to the honorary role of chairman emeritus and adviser to the board of directors until his term expired in January 2020.
In 1996, Ecclestone's International Sportsworld Communicators signed a 14-year agreement with the FIA for exclusive broadcasting rights for 18 FIA championships, controlling the commercial rights to the World Rally Championship. After a European Commission investigation into the FIA, ISC and FOA, a new agreement in early 2000 reduced the number of rights packages, and in April 2000 Ecclestone sold ISC to a group led by David Richards.
On 3 September 2007, it was announced that Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore had bought Queens Park Rangers Football Club; they were later joined as co-owners by Lakshmi Mittal. Ecclestone became majority shareholder with 62% of the shares in December 2010, and in August 2011 he and Briatore sold their entire shareholding to Tony Fernandes. Ecclestone also owned a collection of 69 single-seater Formula One cars, one of the largest racing car collections in the world, valued at an estimated £500 million and including a Ferrari 375 F1, Ferrari 312 F1, Ferrari 246 F1, Brabham BT46B and Maserati 250F; the entire collection was sold to Mark Mateschitz.
For many years, Ecclestone was rumoured to have been involved in the 1963 Great Train Robbery; in a 2014 interview he said the rumour arose from his acquaintance with robber Roy James, the getaway driver and an amateur racing driver.
At the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, following Ayrton Senna's fatal accident but while Senna was still alive, Ecclestone used a walkie-talkie to ask Sid Watkins about Senna's condition. Over the static he misheard Watkins's response of "His head" as "He's dead", and on that basis told Senna's brother Leonardo that Senna had died, though Senna remained biologically alive for several more hours. The misunderstanding caused a rift with the Senna family; Ecclestone travelled to São Paulo at the time of the funeral but watched it on television at his hotel rather than attending.
In 1997, Ecclestone was involved in a political controversy over the British Labour Party's policy on tobacco sponsorship. Ecclestone and Max Mosley, both Labour Party donors, met Tony Blair on 16 October 1997, after which the government argued in Brussels for an exemption for Formula One from a proposed European Union ban on tobacco advertising. After it emerged that Ecclestone had donated £1 million in January 1997, Labour promised to return the money, and Blair apologised on 17 November for his government's mishandling of the affair. In 2008, internal Downing Street memos revealed that the exemption decision had been made at the time of the meeting, not two weeks later as Blair had stated in Parliament.
In a Times interview published on 4 July 2009, Ecclestone made remarks about Adolf Hitler that drew condemnation, including a statement by Stephen Pollard, editor of The Jewish Chronicle. Ecclestone subsequently said his comments were taken the wrong way and apologised, saying "I'm just sorry that I was an idiot."
In a 2012 trial against former BayernLB chief risk officer Gerhard Gribkowsky, the public prosecutor accused Ecclestone of being a co-perpetrator in a bribery case. According to the prosecutor and defendant, Ecclestone paid about $44 million to the former banker; Ecclestone said he paid because Gribkowsky had blackmailed him over a family trust controlled by his former wife. German prosecutors indicted Ecclestone for alleged bribery in July 2013, and on 14 January 2014 a Munich court ruled he would be tried; on 5 August 2014 the same court ruled he could pay a £60 million settlement, without admitting guilt, to end the trial.
In an interview with CNN following the murder of George Floyd, Ecclestone made comments on diversity and racism that Lewis Hamilton criticised on Instagram as "ignorant and uneducated". The Formula One Group issued a statement saying it "completely disagree[d]" with the comments and noted that his title as chairman emeritus had expired in January 2020. Ecclestone was arrested by Brazilian authorities on 25 May 2022 for illegally carrying an undocumented LW Seecamp .32 firearm in his luggage while boarding a private plane to Switzerland; he acknowledged owning the gun but said he was unaware it was in his luggage, paid bail and was freed to travel.
On 30 June 2022, in an interview on ITV's Good Morning Britain, Ecclestone said he would "take a bullet" for Vladimir Putin and described the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a "mistake"; the Formula One Group responded that the comments were his personal views and in stark contrast to the modern values of the sport.
On 11 July 2022, Ecclestone was charged with fraud by false representation by the Crown Prosecution Service after a file from HM Revenue and Customs reported he had failed to declare foreign assets of £400 million. On 12 October 2023, at Southwark Crown Court, Ecclestone pleaded guilty to fraud after agreeing to pay nearly £653 million in back tax and fines. He was sentenced to 17 months in prison, suspended for two years.
Ecclestone has been married three times. With first wife Ivy he has a daughter, Deborah. He had a 17-year relationship with Tuana Tan, which ended in 1984, and was then married to Slavica Radić, a Yugoslav-born former Armani model, for 23 years; the couple have two daughters, Tamara and Petra, and their divorce was granted on 11 March 2009. In August 2012 he married Fabiana Flosi, the vice-president of marketing for the Brazilian Grand Prix. Ecclestone's son with Flosi was born in July 2020, making him one of the oldest known fathers.
In 2002, Ecclestone was listed as the fifth-richest person in the United Kingdom on the Sunday Times Rich List, and as of February 2024 the Forbes World's Billionaires List estimated his net worth at $2.9 billion. He turned down a CBE in 1996 and later a knighthood in the early 2000s, stating he did not believe he deserved it. He received the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria (2000), was made a Commander of the Order of Saint-Charles of Monaco (2006), received an honorary Doctor of Science from Imperial College London (2008), and in 2024 received the FIA President Innovation Medal and the Autosport Awards 75th Anniversary Honouree Prize.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.
Gallery · 4 related images
