The business relationships between the racing teams and their parent companies can be dizzying to a novice. This was made especially clear to me late last year, as I watched the mostly thrilling Brazilian Grand Prix, in rainy São Paulo, on television. McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton was leading for much of the way, until he was clipped by Force India’s Nico Hulkenberg in the 55th lap (of 71) and forced to withdraw because of damage to his front suspension. Force India, like the majority of Formula One teams, has no real expectation of winning races; its cars help justify the existence of a Grand Prix in New Delhi, where monkeys still outnumber luxury automobiles. It also has, as it happens, a “technology sharing” partnership with McLaren, which provided Hulkenberg and his teammate Paul Di Resta with gearboxes and hydraulics. Yet Hulkenberg’s aggressive move—“That’s what happens when you are racing with a less experienced driver,” Hamilton later fumed—cost McLaren 24 points in the standings and, in effect, $10 million of prize money. “One can only hope that the Force India deal brings McLaren more than that because otherwise the customer programme will have been operating at a loss!” the racing journalist Joe Saward wrote on his blog. It was almost as though the Steinbrenners had lent a pitcher to the Royals to help extend the Yankees’ brand awareness in Kansas City, only to watch that pitcher drill Derek Jeter in the head.
Hamilton, in any event, had already announced that he would be leaving McLaren at the end of the season to race for Mercedes—or, rather, to use the teams’ more sponsor-friendly names, he was leaving Vodafone McLaren Mercedes for Mercedes AMG Petronas. This was big news. Hamilton, who is 28, is often thought of as Formula One’s first black champion, and he was already the second-highest-paid driver on the circuit. But, viewed another way, you could say that he was merely expanding his commitment to Mercedes, from an outfit in which the company invests $15 million a year to one in which it sinks $70 million.
On the morning of my trip to Milton Keynes, I stopped to visit the headquarters of Formula One Management, overlooking London’s Hyde Park. I was received there by the so-called F1 Supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, a self-made character who would seem to have been invented by Fleet Street to sell newspapers. Great Britain’s fourth-richest man, Ecclestone is five feet three, with a white mop of hair and a perpetual squint, from being nearly blind in his right eye since birth. (A Daily Mail writer once called him “a tortoise in an Andy Warhol wig.”) Last summer, a couple of months before his 82nd birthday, he was married for the third time, to Fabiana Flosi, a 35-year-old Brazilian whom he met on the track in São Paulo, and who towers over him. (The joke goes that he can look her in the eye when he is standing on his wallet.) His two daughters from his previous wife Slavica, a six-foot-two Croatian who has modeled for Armani, are the Kardashians of England. Tamara, the older one, recently starred in a reality show called Billion $$ Girl, and Petra was married in a Roman castle before buying what had been billed as the United States’ most expensive house, for $85 million, from the Hollywood widow Candy Spelling.
The son of a North Sea herring and mackerel fisherman, Ecclestone grew up in a house without plumbing, quit school at 16, and became a used-car salesman in South London, earning a reputation for “clocking” odometers, or forcibly rewinding them, in the manner of Ferris Bueller. His ruthless street savvy stood him in good stead when he got involved in racing, which had originated as a pastime for Europe’s landed gentry. Racing teams traditionally negotiated with the various circuits individually. Ecclestone persuaded them to negotiate as a bloc—a sort of racing cartel. He was also quick to see the value in television for a sport in which the contestants were distinguished by degrees invisible to the naked eye, and he envisioned, in the paddock behind the teams’ garages, an opportunity to cultivate an exclusive atmosphere such as you’d find at Wimbledon or Henley. By consolidating power over the sport’s promotion when no one else could be bothered, he made himself indispensable, even as the cash flow that Formula One was generating, at first through tobacco sponsorships and then through exclusive television rights, attracted banks and larger financial interests. They could buy him out—and, indeed, a controlling interest in the sport is now owned by a London-based private-equity firm—but they’d still need a public face to run the show. As we spoke, in a tall, dark-glass-fronted building he’d bought nearly 30 years ago from the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, Ecclestone was facing the threat of indictment in Germany, on suspicion of bribery in the amount of $44 million. (He maintains that he was extorted.) But that wasn’t what had him concerned. “I think Europe’s a thing of the past,” he said, and let out a sigh. He meant this both existentially, in the way of a right-winger who sees the welfare state choking itself to insolvency, and as a source of revenue growth for a sport that is sometimes said to thrive on cubic dollars.