Bernie Ecclestone, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Bernie Ecclestone comes up
Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:45:31 Ben Gilbert Or Bernie Eccleston's fix was in.
- ▶ 2:33:11 David Rosenthal So, Bernie Eccleston, you know, the- Bernie!
- ▶ 2:33:26 David Rosenthal Bernie says, Luca leaving is for me the same as Mr.
- ▶ 2:33:47 David Rosenthal You know that there was the FOTA breakaway attempt of the group of teams that just a few years before this had tried to bust Bernie's hold on F-One and breakaway and start a rival Formula Racing League.
- ▶ 2:34:05 David Rosenthal Luca was like, Bernie's arch-adversary just a few years earlier.
- ▶ 2:34:09 Ben Gilbert And so for Bernie to be this cordial.
- ▶ 2:34:11 David Rosenthal And here's Bernie paying tribute to him like this.
Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 28:08 Ben Gilbert Oh, it's Bernie.
- ▶ 28:16 David Rosenthal Bernie Eccleston, the, uh, supremo, impresario, owner of F-One.
- ▶ 28:34 David Rosenthal About Bernie and Ferrari.
- ▶ 28:37 David Rosenthal As it turned out, no one would get richer off the Ferrari mystique than Bernie, a man who has never once employed in Marinello.
- ▶ 28:50 David Rosenthal But before we begin Bernie's tale, now is a great time to thank our presenting partner, JP Morgan Payments.
- ▶ 30:43 Ben Gilbert Okay, so David, enter Bernie Eccleston.
- ▶ 30:46 David Rosenthal Bernie Eccleston.
- ▶ 30:49 David Rosenthal So Bernie was born in 1930, and he was a hardscrabble kid.
- ▶ 31:07 David Rosenthal You never really know what the legend's about Bernie, but that's the story, at least, as he wanted it told.
- ▶ 31:13 David Rosenthal After the war, Bernie ends up getting into the, uh, wheeler-dealer business in London with surplus cars and motorcycles.
- ▶ 31:48 David Rosenthal Bernie's the car guy.
- ▶ 32:12 David Rosenthal There's also always been plenty of gossip over the years that Bernie was involved in more, um, underground activities, shall we say,
- ▶ 32:20 David Rosenthal At the time, and Bernie himself would encourage this.
- ▶ 32:23 David Rosenthal So specifically, there was a longstanding rumor that Bernie was the mastermind behind the great train robbery of 1963, where 2.6 million pounds was stolen from a British Royal mail train.
- ▶ 32:41 David Rosenthal Bernie loved this speculation.
- ▶ 33:01 David Rosenthal You start to get a flavor of, you know, who Bernie is.
- ▶ 33:10 David Rosenthal So criminal mastermind or not, Bernie is smart.
- ▶ 33:40 David Rosenthal So this nets Bernie his first
- ▶ 33:44 David Rosenthal Now, the deeper that he gets into this luxury auto world, Bernie has the same realization that Enzo Ferrari had a decade or two earlier, which is that motorsport and racing is the legitimizing heritage of all of these fast luxury cars.
- ▶ 34:02 David Rosenthal So just like Enzo himself, Bernie wants to have his dealership and his brand associated with
- ▶ 34:11 David Rosenthal So in the mid-sixties, Bernie starts hanging around with F-One drivers, and being the wheeler-dealer that he is, he pretty quickly becomes the agent for a few of his pals, negotiating better deals for them with their teams for their…
- ▶ 35:32 David Rosenthal Bernie, as the story goes, is devastated after Wren's death, and to honor the memory of his friend, he decides that he's going to carry through on the plan that they had together, the dream they had, and in 1972, Bernie buys the Brabham…
- ▶ 36:05 David Rosenthal Uh, Bernie doesn't make that much money on the problem team as we will see, but.
- ▶ 36:13 David Rosenthal So, uh, you know, a nice return, but definitely the fact that team valuations go from a 100,000 pounds to a floor of one and a half billion is thanks to Bernie.
- ▶ 36:23 Ben Gilbert Well, thanks to Bernie for part of it.
- ▶ 36:25 Ben Gilbert And then specifically thanks to Bernie leaving after that.
- ▶ 36:31 David Rosenthal So when Bernie buys the Brabham team in 1972, along with it, he also gains membership into the, quote, Formula One Constructors Association.
- ▶ 37:36 David Rosenthal Well, one thing I can guarantee is that once Bernie takes it over, he's definitely making a profit on it.
- ▶ 37:42 David Rosenthal So Bernie, when he joins this owner's table, shall we say, pretty quickly realizes a couple things.
- ▶ 38:46 David Rosenthal Just to make this exact point, here is the list of F-one teams in 1972, the year that Bernie buys into the league.
- ▶ 39:10 David Rosenthal So Bernie sees this and he's like, dang.
- ▶ 39:28 David Rosenthal So just to paint the picture of the business state of F one, when Bernie came into the league, each individual team negotiated their appearance fees with each individual
- ▶ 41:04 Ben Gilbert Yeah, thankfully, Bernie came along before that became too big.
- ▶ 41:53 David Rosenthal So Bernie shows up, he's hardly a media professional here, but even he can see that there's room for improvement on both of these fronts.
- ▶ 42:27 David Rosenthal I think it's actually worth one more quick pause here to compare, contrast formula one in the NFL and Bernie and Pete Rizal.
- ▶ 42:36 David Rosenthal Cause these are sort of happening at the same time, but Bernie is like the anti Pete Rizal, you know, Pete Rizal was this
- ▶ 43:22 David Rosenthal Bernie's MO isn't league first.
- ▶ 45:01 David Rosenthal Nobody writes anything down, because Bernie never writes anything down, and when the dust finally gets settled, and many decades later, all of the books and stuff become public through a whole series of court cases, turns out Bernie's…
- ▶ 45:46 David Rosenthal Bernie is doing a great service for all the F-One teams and owners.
- ▶ 46:01 David Rosenthal Yep, so before Bernie gets there, the average prize purses and payments that teams would get from a Grand Prix, and obviously they varied wildly, but on average, it was like 10,000 dollars per team, so like, nothing.
- ▶ 46:18 David Rosenthal In Bernie's first year running the show, he takes the average prize and fee payment up to
- ▶ 46:48 David Rosenthal As Bernie would never fail to point out.
- ▶ 47:01 David Rosenthal And back to the original purpose of the Constructors Association of Coordinating Travel Costs, Bernie also goes out and negotiates competitive rates with freight providers and massively improves travel costs on the logistics side of the…
- ▶ 47:17 David Rosenthal Bernie's sort of first act in F-One reminds me of one of my favorite sayings that I heard earlier in my career from a mentor.
- ▶ 47:30 Ben Gilbert So it's worth taking a pause to say the FIA is still the governing body of the sport, of this racing series, and so Bernie takes over this thing called the Constructors Association, but really
- ▶ 48:23 David Rosenthal They go to the FIA and say, Hey, you got to do something about this Eccleston guy.
- ▶ 48:36 David Rosenthal Of protracted negotiations between Bernie and the Constructors Association and the FIA that finally get hammered out in 1981 with the first Concorde Agreement, which is still the name of the roughly every five-year agreements that govern…
- ▶ 49:47 David Rosenthal So in this first Concord Agreement, the two sides, Bernie and the Constructors Association and the FIA and Racetracks by proxy, agree on
- ▶ 50:10 David Rosenthal The Constructors Association and Bernie, they have no say over the technical rules of the sport.
- ▶ 50:24 David Rosenthal All of the race fees and prize money now contractually must be paid centrally to Bernie and the Constructors Association.
- ▶ 50:34 David Rosenthal And two, Bernie and the Constructors Association will control all rights and income from any future televising of F-one races for the next five seasons.
- ▶ 50:55 David Rosenthal All the TV money flowing through Bernie.
- ▶ 51:20 Ben Gilbert Well, did they put in that the TV media rights, when they do happen, Bernie still only gets eight percent and the teams get the rest of the 92%, or is that yet to be negotiated?
- ▶ 51:31 David Rosenthal Bernie thrives in the gray zone.
- ▶ 52:04 David Rosenthal So the teams and the FIA and the tracks, yeah, even though they're giving up all the TV rights to Bernie,
- ▶ 52:37 David Rosenthal So Bernie, unclear if he had a vision for this all along or if he was like, oh, here's something I can grab.
- ▶ 54:29 David Rosenthal Bernie says, all right, no problem.
- ▶ 54:44 David Rosenthal Quote unquote slash me, Bernie.
- ▶ 54:51 David Rosenthal So we should say Bernie loved to operate without contracts.
- ▶ 55:19 David Rosenthal So Bernie goes and sets up a new company.
- ▶ 55:35 David Rosenthal That Bernie is now de facto head of, but doesn't have any legal ownership of.
- ▶ 56:36 David Rosenthal Now, Bernie also gets really lucky here because in the intervening years, the pay TV ecosystem in Europe finally
- ▶ 57:00 David Rosenthal When Bernie started this adventure, it wasn't clear that the same thing was going to happen in Europe, but it did.
- ▶ 57:11 Ben Gilbert In addition to these agreements that Bernie was having everyone sign, race organizers were required to surrender income from trackside advertising and corporate hospitality.
- ▶ 57:32 David Rosenthal So as it's becoming clear that TV rights are now going to be really valuable, the original 1981 Concord Agreement term comes up and Bernie now needs to go negotiate a new deal.
- ▶ 57:54 David Rosenthal Bernie created it in the interim.
- ▶ 58:12 David Rosenthal So Bernie says, okay, okay.
- ▶ 58:44 David Rosenthal And FOPA, Bernie's company, gets 23%.
- ▶ 58:55 David Rosenthal Bernie is a master at playing everyone off here.
- ▶ 58:59 David Rosenthal This split gets negotiated before Bernie really ramps up running bidding processes in each country for the TV rights.
- ▶ 59:32 David Rosenthal When the third Concord Agreement comes up for negotiation in 1992, Bernie goes to the FIA and he's like, you guys, you're getting the TV money, but you can't be happy because it's really not that much, you know, and there's a lot of…
- ▶ 1:00:22 David Rosenthal So Bernie now has the 23% he originally had, plus another 30% that used to belong to the FIA, for which he has to pay five to nine million dollars a year.
- ▶ 1:00:50 David Rosenthal Bernice now got 53%, plus all of his cuts that he's taking from the Constructors Association for his services, plus his team ownership, et cetera, et cetera.
- ▶ 1:01:12 David Rosenthal All of a sudden TV rights go from small single digit millions in aggregate to F one to over twenty five million a year, just flowing into FOPA and Bernie from the TV rights.
- ▶ 1:01:49 David Rosenthal One of the other owners, Ken Tyrell of Tyrell, which, fun fact, is actually the forerunner of the Mercedes team today, publicly accuses Bernie of, quote, stealing F-One from the teams, but that's kind of a minority opinion.
- ▶ 1:02:06 David Rosenthal By and large, they're all still pretty grateful to Bernie at this point, because turning F-One into this major TV sport meant that all of a sudden, all of their individual team sponsorship deals just got way, way, way more valuable.
- ▶ 1:04:36 Ben Gilbert So finally, thanks to tobacco companies and TV meteorites and Bernie, there's all this money flowing into formula one to fund these ever increasingly expensive operations.
- ▶ 1:26:27 David Rosenthal Bernie, starting in 1993, becomes the highest paid corporate executive in Britain, taking home in 1993, 44.5 million dollars in cash, and that's only what's reported to, uh, Her Majesty the Crown in that year, as we'll get into.
- ▶ 1:26:45 David Rosenthal He's also getting older by this point in time.
- ▶ 1:28:20 David Rosenthal There was no sales department besides Bernie.
- ▶ 1:28:43 David Rosenthal Bernie's just out there doing this more or less all by
- ▶ 1:29:07 David Rosenthal Very useful for Bernie's activities.
- ▶ 1:29:10 David Rosenthal There's this great quote that Bernie recalls saying to him when they first start working together.
- ▶ 1:29:27 David Rosenthal In 1993, that same year that Bernie becomes the highest paid executive in the UK, he kind of shadow arranges to get Max installed as the new president of the FIA.
- ▶ 1:29:42 David Rosenthal Meanwhile, he had already somehow connived to get himself, Bernie, already an official role at the FIA as the vice president in charge of promotional affairs.
- ▶ 1:30:03 David Rosenthal So at various times, Bernie was serving in a principal role in
- ▶ 1:30:48 Ben Gilbert He said that Bernie Ecclestone was someone who sold Formula One four times, has never bought it back, has never lost its control, and still owns it.
- ▶ 1:33:19 David Rosenthal Okay, so Bernie's, many sales, and
- ▶ 1:33:47 David Rosenthal What Bernie didn't
- ▶ 1:33:50 Ben Gilbert He had another 25 years at least in him.
- ▶ 1:33:52 David Rosenthal At least, because he's still alive in twenty-twenty-six.
- ▶ 1:34:16 Ben Gilbert So if you actually are a team, this is starting to become kind of an existential risk of what if Bernie dies suddenly and then they have to sell
- ▶ 1:34:48 David Rosenthal Bernie's gonna IPO F one.
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