The Formula, a book about Formula One during the period when it was essentially taken over by a British car salesman named Bernie Ecclestone*, appeared in 2024, when Ecclestone, who had divested himself of his ownership and management role, announced that he was auctioning off his collection of F1 racers. The timing was just about perfect, and the authors, both of whom write for the Wall Street Journal, are well-suited to the task of focusing on the financial aspects of a sports story, as J. Robinson is the European sports correspondent and J. Clegg the sports editor. Early on, the authors highlight the irony of Formula 1 being the only sport named after its rulebook, when, unlike in the worlds of. soccer or baseball, Formula 1 rules are deliberately and drastically changed every few years. Chapters are devoted to the efforts of teams to seek temporary advantage by meticulous and sometimes devious intepretation of those rules in engineering drivetrains, aerodynamics and tires. And, against a background involving big corporate suppliers and sponsors, this effort involves lots of money...
Luckily for the reader, the financial story is far from a dry, statistical slog, because Ecclestone (at right above), who sold his Formula One Group to Liberty Media in 2017 at age 86, became famous during his 40 years of running F1 as a cunning, sometimes shifty deal maker who was one of the first to grasp the importance of TV contracts, deals between teams and corporate sponsors (especially the tobacco industry), and celebrity promotions. The Ecclestone era became known as a time when teams began to see bigger profits (though nothing like Ecclestone's), when costs of designing and building race cars snowballed, and when the control of the sport was essentially ceded by millionaires to billionaires...
It wasn't at all like that in the era when Ecclestone got interested in Grand Prix racing. That period, covered in Robert Daley's The Cruel Sport*, was a time when driver fatalities were frequent, when teams often lost money shipping their cars from race to race, and when the cars themselves were painted in national or team colors, not with graphics or logos demanded by corporate sponsors. The first sponsorship logos appeared on a Brabham and a Lotus in 1968, a year after the last covered in Daley's book. And it's kind of shocking to realize that seatbelts were not required by the FIA (Federation Internationale de l'Automobile) until 1972, the year that Ecclestone bought the Brabham team for 100,000 pounds. As a team owner, Ecclestone was a founder of FOCA (the Formula One Constructors Association) in 1974, and kept ownership of the Brabham team until 1988, after Nelson Picquet had won World Championships twice with it. The drama surrounding the World Championship plays as big a part in the book as the high-level deal-making, with chapters on Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, Lewis Hamilton's move from McLaren to Mercedes, and a gripping chapter on the Abu Dhabi GP in 2021, when Hamilton saw his hopes of a record 8th World Championship dashed by F1 race director Michael Masi's failure to follow the correct restart procedure after an accident. The authors are effective at highlighting the interpersonal conflict and professional discord that have escalated along with the financial stakes in F1. It all reminds this writer of a brief conversation he watched at Road America decades ago, when a boy of grade school age looked at the big wing on the back of a Can-Am racer and asked his dad, "Does that thing keep the car on the track?" The dad replied, "No, son, it's money that keeps the car on the track."
*Footnote: Our brief review of "The Cruel Sport" was posted here on October 29, 2024 in "Book Reviews in Brief: Source Material for Car Wonks and Historians." Our first mention of Bernie Ecclestone was in connection with his 1957 purchase of two historic Formula 1 cars, in "Celtic Rainmaker: Connaught Ended the Longest Drought in Grand Prix Racing", posted on July 24, 2016.
Photo Credits:
Book photos are by the publishers. Photo of Bernie Ecclestone with Brabham BT44 is posted on youtube.com, from an interview by Tom Hartley Jr. Photo of Lewis Hamilton is from motorcities.org.