The art of Bernie-watching

Bernie Ecclestone is an extraordinary character and if you want to have any chance of understanding the way he operates you should read the first five chapters of Susan Watkins’s book called “Bernie”, which is published by Haynes. It has a really splendid foreword by Sir Frank Williams, which sets the tone and then goes into wonderful detail about where Bernie came from and how his character was formed. It slices through the myths. There may be elements of the story that have been left out, but that is not the point. Watkins tries to show Bernie’s character as it really is. I have read all three of the current Bernie books and I think Susan’s is better than Terry Lovell’s, although his is a fascinating work in other respects. I think that Tom Bower’s overblown but widely-distributed tome comes in rather poor third.

When Bernie says something to the media, there is almost always a reason for it to be said. Bernie does not chit-chat much. He sizes up the person he is talking to and decides what message to deliver.

He is usually trying to put pressure on another party in a negotiation, or he is trying to create a smokescreen around something he is up to. In this respect he is a magician. He creates a flash-bang in one direction and everyone looks the wrong way. For some years I used to think that when Bernie said something, the opposite was usually the truth. Thus, based on his recent comments, if I were to say which races will happen in 2012 I would say that we will be in Korea and Austin, but we will not be in Bahrain.

Let’s check back on that in a few months and see if that was true or not.

Sometimes Bernie says things deliberately for effect. Calling Danica Patrick a domestic appliance was one way to get F1 mentioned in the US newspapers. Some would argue that any publicity is good publicity, others would say that negative publicity does one no good. I guess that if nothing else that remark had people talking about F1. On the other hand he fought hard to keep the US Grand Prix in 2005 alive, although that was probably more to do with a power struggle between him and Max Mosley than anything else.

Bernie is now saying that soon there will be only five races in Europe in a few years time.

The Concorde Agreement calls for certain races to be included, but defining exactly how these are picked is not easy. My understanding is that there is a list of 12 countries and six of them must be on the calendar, although I think there are actually 13 listed, with one of them being an either/or choice.

Thus Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Monaco, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Singapore and the UAE/Bahrain have some protected status, but can still be axed as long as six of the others survive. I believe also that team consent is required for the calendar to have more than 50 percent of non-European races, although I am told that US events are not considered to be non-European, which is odd.

At the moment the 2012 calendar has eight European dates: Spain, Monaco, Europe (Spain), Britain, Germany, Hungary, Belgium and Italy and 12 non-European events, so the teams must have agreed to that. To this list will be added Russia. This means that four races will have to disappear. The European F1 contracts run out as follows: Belgium (2012), Valencia (2014), Barcelona (2016), Hungary (2016), Italy (2016), Germany (2018), Russia (2020), Monaco (2020) and Great Britain (2027), which means that the earliest that F1 could drop to five European races would be 2016, although I do not see it being that easy. Yes, Belgium and France are working on a combined deal, and Valencia and Barcelona must face up to alternation or elimination, as happened in Germany. There is no way that Italy will be axed (Ferrari still has power). So I would say a drop to five events could not happen before 2020.

This is all very ethereal stuff but it begs the question: what is he trying to achieve? My reading of that is that Mr E is putting a little pressure on Belgium and France, as I have heard that their alternating deal from 2013-2020 may have fallen out of bed recently and he is trying to get it sorted out again. Alternatively (or perhaps in addition to that) there is the question of Spain. The country cannot afford two Grands Prix and so Bernie probably wants the pressure on them to combine and alternate (never an easy thing with Spaniards).

He might also be saying this in order to give other non-European countries an indication that there will be room on future calendars. It makes his life a lot easier if he has more demand than supply. Russia and New York both have deals, but there are projects like Cape Town, Mexico, Qatar (and probably others) that need to believe that there is room for them.

Either which way, I doubt we will ever see only five races in Europe.

Teams know that they get more money with each race, but they also spend more as Mr E has them running around on the mouse-wheel. If they stopped running for a moment and thought about it for a while, they would make a lot more money by buying the commercial rights from CVC and taking 90 percent of the revenues, paying out five percent to administer the commercial empire and a little bit to keep the FIA happy.

Advertisement