YouSaid · the spoken record

Bernie Ecclestone

lines on the record: 55
first: 2025-07-22
most recent: 2025-07-22
sittings or episodes: 1
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“the same rarefied air as those automotive giants, those on the margins often come to control the center. That maxim ties together all three of these remarkable people. Colin Chapman, Bernie Ecclestone, Dietrich Maschis, all outsiders, all people who took risks, all people who insisted on doing things their own way. The book is full of people and ideas like this I highly, highly recommend that you read it. If you buy the book using the link that's listed down below, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. I also think the new audiobook feature on Spotify is excellent. That's where I've been listening to the audiobook. If you're a Spotify premium member, you literally, it's remarkable what they've done. You literally just search for the audiobook title and then press play and it immediately starts playing. So in case you didn't know about that, I would also do that. I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks on Spotify. If you're not on my personal email newsletter for every book that I read, every episode that I make, I send you a list of the top 10 highlights.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the car they called RB5. He improved it even more for the RB6 the next year. The result, the next year's result was the RB6. Nui estimates it generated more downforce than any car in Formula One history. That meant the RB six could take some of the highest speed corners in the sport flat out. It was as if the car was pasted to the track. Red Bull took pole position in fifteen of the nineteen races that year and clinched its first world title. Thanks to master's investment, Horner's leadership and New Year's genius, Red Bull had cracked the code. The team stomped its way to four consecutive titles. Matches team was now so powerful, so successful, and so integral to the future of Formula One that it was no longer an outsider. Red Bull was a fully fledged paid up member of the establishment, the team that set out to upset the aristocrats now occupied”
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“New technological waves are like that for business. It allows you to think up something completely different, something you couldn't have done before without the invention of that technology and now build a company to take advantage of that new technology. In the same way they're building a car that could take advantage of these new regulations. And no designer was more comfortable staring at a blank piece of paper than Adrian Newey. I do enjoy regulation changes, says Newey. Perhaps the part of my job I enjoy the most is figuring out what those regulations mean. What is their intention? And if a subtle different difference allows us to explore new horizons, the result of those explorations was a red bull car unlike anything the team had produced before. This is exactly why you overpay talent because it's nearly impossible to overpay for talent. Newy had digested the rules, changes, and produced a bold and revolutionary design that went like a rocket.”
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“What should we do? Well, it depends, Berger replied, on what value do you put on a second lap? In other words, do you want to win or not? Because if you want to win, pay the man. Adrian Newy was formerly introduced as Red Bull's chief technical officer in november two thousand five with the stated aim of building the team into a championship contender. There was an energy about us. We were like a young band on our way up. Again, it's just like a startup. The band's first hit came in two thousand nine. The FIA had introduced sweeping new regulations designed to encourage more overtaking during races. The changes covered everything from the bodywork to the tires. So inside of F1 when they change the rules, right? The rule changes changes amount to a blank sheet of paper for designers. You could think of, you think about all the different people that we cover and we study together on the spike.”
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“Take place with Dietrich mashes it. So Horner and Newy fly to Salzburg. Then they take a helicopter into the Alps to have lunch with Dietrich. And then this far it was hilarious. We showed them something of what Red Bull is like. Among other things, we stuck him in one of our alpha jet fighters and went inverted over a mountain at five hundred feet. No, thank you. You can count me out on ever doing that. That sounds terrifying. So what happens, they wind up having great lunch, and then Newbie tells Diatrik his number. And Diatrick does something that's really smart here. So it says when Dietrich discovered how much the world's highest paid racing designer was expecting to take home, he was unsure if Newy was worth that price tag. So Mascess made a call to Gerhard Berger, Red Bull's original Formula One driver, and now had become one of his closest confidants. Gerhard, we have Adrian Newry here in Salzburg, but he is very, very expensive.”
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“That way before his peers, way before his peers, that the single biggest competitor wasn't the other cars, it was wind resistance. And so he thought if he could defeat wind resistance better than the other teams, he would automatically win more races. And he has spent 40 years thinking about every Nick, Groove, or Cranny on the surface of a race car. And so what Christian Horner would do is he essentially started stalking New Eath. Newy's working for another team at the time. And so he would just like randomly bump into just, oh, I didn't know you were going to be here. He knew he was going to be here, knew he talked about this. His tactic was to build a relationship with me was by accidentally bumping into me all throughout the paddock. And so this happens over and over again. They start talking and what Horner realizes like, oh, newie's, like, he would at least entertain the thought of leaving one of the sport's most storied teams for the F1 equivalent of a startup, which is what Red Bull is at this point. The only question they hadn't discussed at that stage was money, and that discussion would have to.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“an opportunity and occasionally rolling the dice and I'm prepared to take a chance now I'm willing to take a risk on you. And so their very first thing that they do is they need to find greater technical leadership and direction. So Christian Horner sets in sights on recruiting what is the most highly regarded aerodynamics export in the sport. This guy named Adrian Newe actually ordered several months ago when I started getting into F1. I ordered Adrian Newy wrote a book called How to Make a Car or How to Build a Car, I think. Eventually, going to read it and turn it into an episode. But Adrian Newey has designed championship winning cars in three different decades. I'm just going to pull out some other quotes, just give you some background real quick background on how important this is. Nui says that aerodynamics, which is the study of how air flows around a solid object, is the single biggest performance differentiator in F1. And he is the expert in that domain. He understood.”
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“Those on the margins often come to control the center. It's exactly what's about to happen here. So they call what he does next his most audacious gamble of his career inside of F1. He hired the youngest team principal in F1 history, handed him the keys to the entire operation, and got out of the way. This is going to be Christian Horner. This is over twenty years ago, so says at the time, Christian Horner is this thirty-one-year-old had never, who had never driven an F1 car, never worked for an F1 team, possessed no college degree or expertise in engineering, design, or aerodynamics, but something about his keen understanding of how to marshal the resources of a racing outfit in the lower categories of motorsport had impressed Mashuset. I've got big ambitions with this team, Dietrich told Horner. I want it to be different. I wanted to have different energy. We are not going to be corporate. We're going to do things the Red Bull way. It meant trusting your gut. It meant giving youth.”
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“Is the best possible marketing we could do to achieve that goal of transforming his brash outsider into a genuine contender capable of toppling F1 blue bloods like Ferrari and McLaren, Mashis had made what may have been the most audacious gamble of his career. Remember that? The idea that energy drink, this red bull company is coming into F one where Ferrari has been racing for, I don't know what thirty, forty years at this time”
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“Who spent twenty one days constructing this? So it fits on top of the pontoon. This one was equipped with a DJ booth and a swimming pool and a further six, and it took six hours of sailing this entire monolith forty miles down the coast, where then they docked it in the Monaco Harbor right next to these giant super yachts. Dietrich was having so much fun that he love this guy. He was having so much fun that he soon decided owning one F1 team wasn't enough. Less than a year after establishing Red Bull Racing, Mastis acquires a second team. This was clearly a company planning for the long term. There was a lot of people on the sport that would come in, they would be all excited. They could even burn hundreds of millions of dollars and then they'd disappear. But Dietrich wasn't like this. As mashes and his Red Bull Empire weren't going anywhere. So now they start to focus like, what is the best possible marketing we could do for F1 team? Winning. Winning is the...”
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“Wide open and welcomed everyone, mechanics, drivers, engineers, and team principals. It didn't matter who you were or which team you worked for. Anyone with a paddock pass around their neck was welcome to come to the parties on the energy station roof where guests could listen to electronic dance music while knocking back a couple of beers or vodka red bulls. Red Bull soon established itself as the sport's foremost disruptor, seemingly determined to challenge every unwritten rule and standard way of operating, so they love the energy station idea, but the most famous F1 race takes place in Monaco. The energy station's not going to fit there. So like, oh, okay, so we'll build one that's just for Monaco. And we're going to make sure it floats so we can put it in the Mediterranean Sea. Says the team commissioned a ginormous floating pontoon, which was assembled and stored in the Alps until the week before the Grand Prix, when it was hauled to northern Italy.”
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“Did something one way is that necessarily the way Red Bull would do it? And if it's not the way we would do it, then why don't we change it? The first thing they do is there's these motorhomes that every team comes to the track. Every team parks these motorhomes in the paddock. At the time, the express purpose is for to talk to your sponsors and to hold technical meetings. Well, Red Bull had something a little different in mind. So they build this giant thing they call the energy station. It is a gleaming three story glass and steel edifice with a hydraulic roof that lit up at night to reveal a nightclub on the upper deck. They said it looked much more like a spaceship that a spaceship had landed in the paddock. The most radical part of the energy station wasn't even the design. It was the door policy. At the time, the team motor home was supposed to be one of the most sacred and private enclaves in the paddock, a place where deals were made and race strategies were devised. But Red Bull threw its doors.”
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“So, the problem was he's the presenting sponsor, right? Of a team that is losing all the time. He's like, this is not good. So he says, if an insurance company sponsors a team and that team loses, people don't change their insurance company. But when the Red Bulls lose, people will get a new drink. And so they had the idea. They're like, well, we don't actually just only sponsor other events and other athletes. We actually create our own events. And we dream up these spectacles and we actually own them. So why don't we do the same thing for Formula One? So he buys the four Jaguar F1 team, which I guess was in bad straits because he gets it for one pound sterling, renames it Red Bull Racing. Once again, what is his first instinct? To tweak the recipe. He wants Red Bull to be the loudest team, and they're going to come into every single thing. Again, I think this is one of the most important points of the chapter, the most important idea is what's going to happen here. We always thought that if the old teams...”
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“This is pretty crazy. Red Bull sponsors, I don't even know how many athletes today. The first person, the first time they sponsor a professional athlete is an F1 driver. They're doing this all the way back in 1989. It is the Austrian driver Gerhard Berger. So that's his first place. Okay, well, we're going to sponsor individual drivers. Few years later, he's like, well, actually, why don't we sponsor entire teams so that to become a title sponsor, so kind of like the presenting sponsor, right? The title sponsor of a Swiss F1 team. Then a few years later, they're like, hey, we're going to establish our own driver development program so we can identify young prospects that have F1 potential. And they just keep finding more and more ways to ingratiate themselves and invest in F1. It says even other billionaires with a gift for marketing and a thirst for speed were surprised by how quickly Mashius ramped up his investment in the sport.”
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“Thrill seeking lunatics launched homemade flying machines off the end of a pier all of which helped to finance master's tastes for acquiring his own aircraft. So you can actually go. He has his own hangwork he had. He passed away a few years ago. And he had his own hangar, but he really had his own private air force. Remember the idea that he has his own private air force. This will come in later when he's recruiting for his Formula One team. And so Red Bull is now financing his taste for requiring his own aircraft and his personal desire to own a private island in Fiji. Doesn't everybody want to own their own South Pacific Island? he said. Yet none of those endeavors embodied Red Bull's quintessential greetings of speed, endurance, and the imminent threat of mortal danger quite like Formula One. Mashus looked at F one drivers and recognized them for what they really were, overcaffeated adrenaline junkies with scant regard for their personal safety.”
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“Just wanted a carbonated, less concentrated version of the original, so he stripped the ingredients down to the essentials. Then he redesigned the traditional soda can into an eight ounce bullet shape and priced it at two dollars a pop to signal that this wasn't just another cola. By nineteen ninety eight, Red Bull had single handedly created a whole new category of beverage called energy drinks, was selling three hundred million cans worldwide. I think they sell like four billion cans. I forgot the number I just read. It was like 4 billion cans a year. It's nuts. Was selling 300 million cans worldwide and had made matches a billionaire. The secret to Red Bull's success was in the flavor or its health benefits, but the ingenious way it was marketed. And so this is one of the main points I hope you go back and listen to episode 333 because the way he matches viewed Red Bull, he called it a marketing conglomerate. His very unique idea was outsource everything else but the marketing. He plastered the Red Bull logo on skateboarders, base jumpers, cliff drivers, ice climbers, ultra marathoners, water, full kayakers, and all over any oddball event in which”
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“This is what he said about that time of his life, right before he starts Red Bull. All I could see was the same gray airplanes, the same gray suits, the same gray faces. All the hotel bars looked the same, and so did the women in them. Mashius was desperate for way out of this monochrome nightmare. He found it on a business trip to Thailand in nineteen eighty two. Searching for something to take the edge off his jet lag, Mashius was offered a local pick me up that was a favorite among long haul truck drivers, a syrupy, yellowish concoction cooked up by a Thai pharmacist as a cure for hangovers. It hit Massis like a triple especial shot to the eyeball. Within months he had quitted his job and set up a company to start selling this miraculous stuff in the West before it reached the shelves. Masters made a few tweaks to the recipe. Okay, so again, I think that's a great tweaking the recipe and everything that he does is mash its MO. And I think the main point of this chapter.”
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“The titles Red Bulls Maniac Billionaire Founder, there were no biographies of English in English on Dietrich Master, the founder of Red Bull. And so we translated one from German to make that episode. He's one of my favorite founders, the way he thinks he's just a complete outsider and a little bit of crazy as we'll see. So he's the last person I want to profile here. Dietrich Masters never intended to build a Formula One world champion, but then he never intended to build a global energy drink empire either. How he managed to pull off two such unlikely feats despite harboring no lifelong ambition to accomplish either one can be traced back to the same basic impulse. Mashus was bored. He gets bored very, very easily. As a marketing executive in his native Austria, Mashis traveled the world hawking toothpaste, detergent, and women's cosmetics. He was stuck in a rut, fast approaching forty, and tired of life on the corporate treadmill.”
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“One more popular than it had ever been. F1 was now broadcast in more than a hundred countries. It boasted ratings of two hundred million viewers per race. Twenty years after he entered the sport as an outsider, that's another super important point about being an outsider. Bernie was now pulling all of the strings. Even if no one was quite sure who owned Formula One, there was no longer any doubt that the man known around the paddock as the supremo was in charge. One of my favorite maxims from Game of Thrones is those on the margin often come to control the center. That's exactly what happened with Bernie. It's what happened with Chapman. It's what happened about Dietrich, Maschis, founder of Red Bull. You see it over and over again in these books. So I got one more person I want to talk about. One of my favorite founders. I think one of the best episodes I've ever done, one of the ones I'm most proud of is episode 333. If you have not listened to it yet or if you've listened to it when it came out, you know, a year or two ago, you should listen to it again.”
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“Just another team owner hoping to build a quick car and find a half decent driver to sit in it. Now he was profiting from their work on a scale that no one had seen who had seen F one in the ragtagged nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies had ever imagined. They put limits on their work. They put limits on their opportunities. Bernie did not, one of my favorite Bruce Lee quotes, is like if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or otherwise, it'll spread into the rest of your life. It'll spread into your work. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, but you must not stay there. You must go beyond them. That's exactly what Bernie did. They stayed there. He went beyond them. You've stolen F1 from the teams another constructor shouted at Bernie. Bernie disagreed. Eccleston felt that the only reason they could still afford to put fuel in their cars and tires on their wheels was him. What wasn't up for debate was that by the early nineteen nineties, Eccleston had made formula.”
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“now went through Bernie, and so did most of the profits in nineteen eighty nine. So I have on my desk printed out the highest salary for an NBA player. I think it starts with, you know, it goes back 60 years or something. Starts like $8,000 a year, all the way up. I think now it's like 75 million a year or something like that. So 1989, they're like, oh my God, these driver salaries are so high. It's unprecedented. They're making six million a year. The top drivers now get paid just for their salary like 65 million a year. And you just see that happen over and over again. Things grow way bigger than people anticipate. I'll take as much money as I can get and I don't get as much as I should, Bernie said. He was the highest paid executive in Britain. In 1993, his combined salary from the two companies he used for selling television and sponsorship rights amounted to $44 million. The people responsible for actually racing Formula One cars could hardly wrap their heads around what was happening to their sport. This is maybe the most important part. Eccleston had been one of them. Just another constructor.”
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“As far as Eccleson was concerned, all of that amounted to controlling Formula One. Nobody was there trying to stop me from doing something that I thought was good, he says. What all of his opponents had found was that the appearance of chaos around Eccleston was in fact his greatest weapon. No one was ever quite sure where they stood. No one could sense when things were about to change. No one could even look up anything. The only complete and accurate accounting of F one's operations existed not in the regulatory finding filings or tax returns, but inside Eccleston's head. I carry out my business in a very unusual way, he said. I don't like contracts. I like to be able to look someone in the eye and then shake them by the hand rather than do it the American way with ninety two page contracts that no one reads or understands. If I say I won't, then I won't. Surprisingly, people seem to like that. All major decisions about where F1 raced and how it looked.”
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“Nemesis, the one he hates, had no clue how much he was leaving on the table in the future in a lifetime of questionable decisions, this was surely the most expensive. Bernie had beaten him once and for all. And here's another way that Bernie built the business and made more money. Bernie's strategy was to tell every race organizer that they weren't important. He told them that he didn't really want more grand prize, the teams didn't want more races, and they were the ones getting cut. And so these hosting fees actually looked us up. Now countries pay a ton of money to Formula One to host a race in their country. The numbers I found they said it ranges anywhere from 20 million a year to all the way up to 57 million a year. By the 1990s, it had become a legitimate question around the sport. Who owned Formula One? Bernie Eccleson insisted there was only ever one answer. He controlled the television rights and was well onto his way of controlling the commercial rights too. He was also in charge of negotiating with the circuits and local promoters.”
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“They do another Concorde agreement. Under that agreement, 30% of the broadcast revenue goes to that governing body, while the rest went to Ecclestone and the teams. But after the end of the EBU agreement, which was the bulk deal he did with the 92 and 90-something broadcasters, right? This is so crazy to me. The FA got spooked about the future of television, which suited Bernie perfectly. They traded away its thirty percent stake of the TV rights for nine million dollars. I don't know if this is true, but there is a rumor. Keep in mind. There's a rumor that Liberty Media, who owns the rights today, turned down a twenty billion dollars offer from Saudi Arabia for those rights. thirty some odd years earlier the FIA sells their rights thirty percent of these rights for nine million dollars by taking the guaranteed cash now”
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“Rights for a five year cycle to $120 million, the most remarkable thing about the price which dwarfed anything happening in other European based sport wasn't just the size of it. It was exactly how much of that money found its way directly back to Echleston. So we're going to get into how much money this guy. He's the highest paid executive in Britain. How much money this guy was paying himself? But I need to point out to make this point that's so important. I was like, wow, look how much money they're making in 1990. He got involved in the sport in 1960, 1961, 1962. This guy did not interrupt the compounding. Now, the rights and F1 itself has been sold over and over again since then. But he built his career. I think he was 45. I think he's 44 something like that by the time he starts doing this. And I think when he finally stops, he's like in his mid-80s. So back to this. It was exactly how much of that money found its way directly back to Eccleston.”
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“Oh, wait, I actually have a better idea here now. So he'd been working his used car dealer magic on TV executives all over the continent and figured that the once critical EBU agreement could now be dispensed like an old tire if he could sell the TV rates separately in each country there was a fortune to be made who needed one bulk deal when he could make dozens of smaller ones by nineteen ninety F1 claimed a global audience for the season north of one point two billion viewers in order to keep growing that number Ecclestone pursued his efforts to professionalize the series. He moved the start of every grand free to two PM Europe time so that people knew where and when to find the races again imposing order where there was chaos. He also convinced broadcasters to build programming around the start and finish of the events to generate more screen time for the cars and circuits, all of which push the value of F1's TV.”
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“Think about what he's doing. He's taking something that's chaotic and organizing and just applying order to it. How the hell are you going to grow your sport? How are you going to, your customers, your fans, your viewers, if they don't know, it's like, okay, the Monaco's on. And then what about next week's race? I turn on the TV. There's nothing there. No explanation. Where is this thing? It has to be organized. And then he does something really smart. At the very beginning, he's like, listen, I'm not even going to charge you that much. The money, the estimate on this deal was like low seven figures. But Eccleson's point is like, I don't care about the cash. What I care about is the visibility because the real cash is from the sponsors. By securing large chunks of airtime for races on television stations across Europe, he had manufactured hundreds of hours of new exposure for F1 sponsors, everything from the logos on the cars to the boards by the side of the track were now guaranteed eyeballs. And he lets that deal build up his own sport.”
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“Easy for them to show like the Monaco Grand Prix and then ditch the race that's in Sweden. If they wanted Formula One, they'd have to commit to it by airing every single Grand Prix in its entirety again.”
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“The 1960s and 1970s, revolutionizing golf and tennis by building his clients into household television names, starting with Arnold Palmer. Again, his idea is like, we could just do the same with F1 drivers and look at today. Go look at the top F1 drivers and then look at how many people follow and engage on social media. They're some of the most famous people on the planet because there's only 20 of them. Eccleston had the potential to do the same for Formula One, the most significant deal came almost immediately. So he does a deal with this cumbersome bureaucratic beast called a European Broadcasting Union, the EBU. So this is an umbrella group that represents 92 public broadcasters across the European continent. And Ecclestone convinced them that F1 racing was a product that they desperately needed. He's a great salesman. There were just a few conditions no longer could they cherry pick the best races and ignore the rest.”
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“High end, exclusive area, you know how concerts have like, they can sell a lot for like backstage passes? Well, what's the backstage pass for F1? It's access to the paddock. And we could sell that to sponsors to bring their customers. We can have celebrities back there, power brokers. And I've been invited to multiple F1 races and I've had to say no both times because of working on the podcast. And one of them was in Miami and I didn't know in the book it says like these tickets or if you can even buy them in many cases you'd have to be a sponsor, they were run to the tens of thousands now. Again, that's like half a century from when Bernie's thinking about it. Which is just like this idea is hiding in plain sight. Like we have assets that were not using. It's just right there. We just have to think differently to carve them out, to create them. So it says EchoSon knew that television remained the future. He'd spent time in the United States where the NFL was turning TV into its purpose for existing. Bernie had also come across a young American agent who spent”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He just adds order to where there is chaos. And he's got a lot of ideas. So like think about this. And I would say many of these ideas, they're kind of like opportunities hiding in plain sight. Again, going back to what I think is the main theme of what I'm trying to talk to you about. It's just like seeing what everybody else does and just like, what can I do that's different? I don't want to just copy like I can keep like he is innovating in an existing sport. The sport has been going on for decades at this point. You know, so this idea is like, I don't know, like TV seems to be really valuable. Then he also does smart things, which I'll talk to you about in a minute, where you're like, well, look at what the NFL is doing with TV in America. Like, why can't we just take that idea and apply it to our sport in Europe? Another idea he had because he was always trying to go like high end. And I'll talk more about this later. But he's like, okay, well, the paddock, right? Where all the teams are during the races, it used to be like closed off. They were like obsessed with secrecy. You just have the engineers and the mechanics there. And he's like, yeah, but this is like a very...”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end of 1972 season, his first season in the game, Bernie went to all the European promoters demanding that they increase the prize fund to forty three thousand pounds, and he does this over and over again. So that was in 1972. By 1976, the demands were up to 150,000 pounds a race. Then the next year, 165,000 pounds a race, then 190,000 pounds a race. If circuits weren't prepared to pay, then the teams just wouldn't go. Eccleston had no problem making himself an annoyance because he knew everything always came down to money, even when they acted like it didn't. Enzo Ferrari had taught him that much is the advice that Enzo Ferrari gave Bernie Ecclestone. You should never let people know you're running a brothel. You have to pretend it's a hotel and keep the brothel in the basement. Bernie's role at Foca, this organization you just founded, would see him spend the decade wrangling the strange, confusing world of motorsport politics.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paid fairly on time and in full. The other owners shouted Bernie down at first. They had no interest in adding more negotiations and more administrative nonsense to their workloads. We'll all do it, Eccleson said, but I want a fee. Remember this moment. Eccleston was offering to take on all the responsibility 100% of the risk to guarantee proper appearance money for the teams wherever they raced. It's the precise instant when the sands of the entire sport began to shift. Eckleston would make the deals with the circuits and he would make sure the whole show turned up all Bernie wanted in return was eight percent of whatever the promoter shelled out to the group of teams that would eventually form the formula one constructor association which is this organization that Bernie is founding it was more than acceptable price for the luxury of never worrying about this stuff again and then we'll see that Bernie has a little bit of like Michael”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so they use the example of the 1970 season. The 1970 season, only seven of the 12 teams competed in every single race. To Eckleston, the whole ad hoc money-losing setup was nothing short of outrageous. What was the point of faring cars, drivers, and mechanics as far away as Canada and South Africa if the team was only going to come home several thousand pounds lighter? What the teams needed was to work together, controlling the terms and negotiating as one. They could be a cartel if they wanted. They just didn't know it yet. And so I was reading another profile of Bernie and I came across this great description of what he changed. He says promoters were used to haggling with shoestring privateer teams, suddenly found themselves facing a united front led by a ruthlessly effective negotiator. So this is his proposed solution. Eccleson proposed that the British outfits form a company that would optimize the logistics of racing in Formula One and make sure everyone got”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Modern Formula One and ran his three ring circus for more than forty years can be boiled down to one fundamental skill. He was wired to make deals. Eccleston used that six cents for deal making to revolutionize Formula One in three critical areas. The first was taking control of the team's relationship with the racetracks. The second was harnessing television, the single force on which every modern sports empire is built, and the third was seizing on the importance of sponsorship. Eccleston's purpose in life became to grow Formula One. From his very first meetings with F one's other team owners, Eckleston sniffed opportunity this part was fascinating. Some of the people around the table had been hugely successful in the auto industry, and others were brilliant designers or racers. But if he was being honest, Enzo Ferrari aside, these weren't sharks. They weren't as crafty as the gamblers he made.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He likes the engineer. This is history reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manages all. Ecclestone managed F one's money, and he did that for nearly four decades, more on how Bernie worked. The recipe was to exploit loopholes, uncertainty in anything that wasn't spelled out in binding legalese, and once you've done that, guard those secrets like a Soviet spy. Share only what you are compelled to share, and never let anyone peek inside the garage. It is no coincidence that the motorhome that followed him around to all the races from the early nineteen nineties became known as the Kremlin. Your problem is you always want things absolutely clear Bernie once told a close associate, and sometimes it's better if things are not clear. When you live into your nineties as a billionaire architect of a massively popular sport, marry three times and watch your daughters grow into full time famous people, the public tends to get curious. But everything you need to know how Bernard Ecclestone built the foundations of”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Million dollars today. Being a team owner came with a serious perk. This is again how he's going to maneuver himself into position of power. It gave him entry to the periodic meetings of the British constructors. So they either racing car team owners. They would get together to discuss all the pressing issues in the sport. It was around this time that Ecclestone also met the most famous car builder in the world, Enzo Ferrari. Ecclestone and Ferrari grasped early on what racing fans were coming to see. So the Ferrari's were the stars. Whether supporters cheered for them or against them, the Ferraris were by far the most important team. And as it turned out, no one would get richer off of the Ferrari Mystique than Bernie. Ecklson admits that there was never a plan nor did anyone know exactly how rich he was. That was one of the two things he wouldn't talk about. You'll never get me to discuss last night, he once said, or money. Bernie wasn't like a driver who knew every bump and curve of a race track's corners.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scared the living daylights out of himself in at least one serious crash. The death of his close friend, the driver Stuart Lewis Evans, from Burns sustained at the nineteen fifty eight Moroccan Grand Prix had convinced Eccleston to give up racing forever, but he wasn't ready to quit the game. In addition to being his friend, Eccleston had also been Lewis Evans' manager. By the mid-1960s, Eccleston was hanging out in Formula One circles and developing a deep bond with the driver Jokin Rind, who had Joken Rind, I think is how you pronounce it, is the one I just told you about that died, that wrote the letter to Chapman, and then wind up dying 16 months later. The friendship morphed eventually into a business partnership. This one too ended in tragedy. Eccleston says to this day that he never recovered from his friend's death at the wheel of the Lotus seventy two car. Strangely, though, Bernie only increased his commitment to the sport after the accident. Eccleston bought a team for a hundred thousand pounds, which would be the equivalent for about a little less than two minutes.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The sharks he's dealing with rough people in a rough neighborhood. Remember, fundamentally his story, this story that I want to tell you, is like, how did a used car dealer turn himself into a Formula One billionaire? In that world of thugs and East End gangsters, the five foot two Ecclestone had somehow carved out a spot for himself. He's making enough money so then he establishes, he goes, he wants to sell more luxury cars. He establishes a sparkling all white showroom in the outer reaches of southeast London. Business was booming. The fisherman's son now carried wads of bills in his bespoke suits and insisted that his place of business be as immaculate as his appearance. He's obsessed with cleanliness, he starts selling a bunch of luxury cars. Before long Eckleson wasn't just selling cars to Sheikh Londoners. He was loaning those customers the money to buy them as well. As he raked in cash selling cars and collecting interest, his passion for racing never left him.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These were values that Ecklestone had understood instinctively since the school playground when he sold cookies and buns at a markup having just bought them from the local bakery with the money from his newspaper route. As a kid he knew he had a scrap for every penny. It's not as if his parents would ever be in a position to help. His dad was a fisherman, his mom was a stay-at-home mom, their first house didn't even have indoor plumbing. This guy is going to make himself billions of dollars and he grew up in a house without indoor plumbing. And where he grew up was really important, just like with Colin Chapman. Ecclestone is also growing up in London, in the Kent neighborhood, says Kent was being built back from the damage inflicted by German bombers, Ecclestone became keenly aware of the growing demand for car and motorcycle parts. So he's actually trading parts. This is one of his first businesses. It didn't take long for him to start dealing in whole cars and motorcycles. And then he honed his skills among”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Promote this very unique sport, and then how do you make it into a business? Because when he comes into it, most of the people are losing money racing. There is no sustainable business model. It was very fractured. And I think he just got a ton of really interesting ideas on how to actually build how he built the business of F1. So it says Bernie Ecclestone had a lot of reasons to admire Enzo Ferrari. When he first entered the sport in 1970 as a sharp used car dealer who turned himself into a driver agent, Eccleston knew that Enzo had been a force to be reckoned with for nearly twenty years. Not only did Enzo wield tremendous influence over the direction of Formula One, but Enzo learned that there was more to this whole racing game than winning races. Ferrari understood that image matter, that a veneer of class mattered, and more than anything getting your way mattered. The sport is on the table once told Bernie. And the business is underneath it.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“completely unaware that DeLorean's company was a financial house of cards. Lodus would help design the chassis for a fee of seventeen million dollars. Only none of that money ever found its way to Lotus for developing the car, so British prosecutors had been tipped off to this whole arrangement. They alleged that DeLorean had pocketed eight point five million of the government fee while Chapman had taken eight million for himself. In the fall of nineteen eighty two, Delorian was arrested in a sting operation while attempting to buy two hundred twenty kilograms of cocaine with the attempt to distribute. In England, Chapman could feel the walls closing in weeks later.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That season, Chapman's latest creation was by far the quickest, most advanced car on the grid. The next year's car was even better. Mario Andretti said the Lotus seventy nine was the closest thing that he'd ever driven to perfect. He won the championship. The celebration was muted. Andretti's lotus teammate Ronnie Peterson had been involved in a fiery crash at the start of the race and died that night. It was the fifth fatality of a lotus driver. That tragic championship would be Chapman's last, but his worst decision still lay ahead. This is the part of the story where John DeLorean makes an appearance. Delorean was a smooth talking former General Motors executive. He had a scheme to build Delorean cars in northern Ireland by using grants from the British government, with the UK facing mass unemployment, the government signed up to the tune of tens of millions of pounds.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel like it was cornering on rails, Chapman laid out all of his thinking in a rambling twenty seven page memo to the Lotus RD department. The crux of it was an insight that no one else had fully considered yet, and the idea they referred to as ground effects is generating downforce but from underneath the car. Chapman wondered what if he could add to that effect from underneath the car. The concept worked so dramatically that when Mario Andretti asked if he could try it out at a grand prix in late nineteen seventy six, so they started building the prototype in 75. It was going to be ready for 77 halfway through the 76 season. Chapman had it ready. So his driver is like, hey, let's use it right now. Chapman responded with a firm no because he didn't want the other team seeing what fresh hell he was about to unleash on them. Once Andre finally got behind the wheel, he said that Lotus seventy eight might as well have been painted to the right.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of his drivers had an accident before he winds up having a fatal accident and writes Chapman a letter. This guy named Yokin Rint. And part of the thing he says, he says, honestly, your cars are so quick that we could still be competitive with a few extra pounds used to make the weakest parts stronger. Please give my suggestions some thought. I can only drive a car in which I have some confidence, and I feel the point of no confidence is quite near sixteen months later rent was dead. A brake shaft in his car failed at the Italian Grand Prix. He hurtled through a poorly installed crash barrier where the impact caused his own seatbelt to slit his throat. The Italian authorities charged Chapman with manslaughter since he was the man responsible for the car he was acquitted six years later. One of Chapman's rivals said that man should have his own private graveyard. In nineteen seventy seven, Chapman was reinvigorated by an eruption of fresh ideas, and if he got this idea right, the car would”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Overlentless in his pursuit of an edge that his own drivers began to wonder if the part of the car that he cared least about was the one strapped into the cockpit tragedy with such a regular occurrence in Formula One at the time that two dozen drivers were killed in the first fifteen years of the series alone. Three had been at the wheel of one of Chapman's cars. So in his private memos he actually grappled with this ethical line between pushing boundaries and protecting lives, and he was writing notes to himself. As a racing car has only one objective, to win motor races. If it does not, it is nothing but a waste of time and money. It does not matter how safe it is if it doesn't consistently win it is nothing. Brutally frank, these words lay bare Chapman's competitive creed. He compared a Formula One driver to a mountaineer. Each knew the risks of the climb. The danger was part of the pursuit.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or 85,000 pounds for a year. Over the next few decades, the tobacco industry alone is going to pour 4.5 billion into F1. All that started because Chapman was just looking for way to pay the bills for his racing team so he could just invent more. The new source of income was enough to keep the lights on a little longer in the Lotus Garage, where Chapman continued to live up to his reputation as F1's resident mad scientist like all mad scientists. He insisted he wasn't mad, simply misunderstood, in particular by the ever-expanding Formula One rulebook. In his mind, the whole set of regulations should have been able to fit on the back of an envelope. This is what his proposal was. Pick the maximum capacity of the engines, choose the type of fuel, and specify that the resulting car has to fit in a box so long, so wide, and so high. Then we can really get down to making a car. Not that the regulation slowed him down much, Chapman was so”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“F one cars were simply painted according to the nationality of the racing team. It may seem trivial to you and I today, but at the time, this was a shocking break from tradition, which is obviously one of the main points of what I want to talk to you about today and every single person going to profile is the fact that they just came in, they studied how everybody else was doing things, said, hey, you know what? I have other, I have different ideas. I'm going to pursue a different way of doing things. They're all very entrepreneurial. And so when he talked about inventing the sponsored paint job, he just thought it was very pragmatic. He's like, I'm going to go race on Sunday and I'm going to go sell on Monday. And all the money coming into the team, then he could then use for more inventions. So it says not only did the deal fill the team's coffers, it also kicked off a 40-year spell of unbroken association between F1 and the tobacco industry. Now here's the crazy thing. He sold the first sponsored paint job was to, I think, Golden Leaf Tobacco. It was $85.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When most cars still used frames where the structure sat on a skeleton of steel tubes, Chapman produced the Lotus twenty five. It was a single hole and was inspired like everything else he did by airplane design. The central frame of the car was one piece of molded aluminum. In Chapman's internal quest to cut weight from his cars, this was the equivalent of a three week juice cleanse. There was one thing that Chapman was prepared to add to his car before anyone else, and it came from his lifelong struggle to round up enough money to go racing. In this case, it was a sponsored paint job. I can't believe this guy also invented the sponsored paint job in F one for nearly two decades, so they had been racing F1 for two decades up until this point. And before Chapman had the idea to sell to sell that paint job, to sell space on his cars to sponsors.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The driver from its regular position in front of him. This might not seem so unusual until you remember that the natural order of ground locomotion until that point had always been a horse or a locomotive pulling the rest of the show, not pushing it. Chapman let his imagination run wild, ideas poured out of him so fast that as soon as they were shuffled into development, Chapman was already on to the next thing. In fact, I read something hilarious his colleagues would nickname him the white tornado because he was so high energy. Turns out says that he had manic energy, but he was also says his manic energy was boosted by a regime of uppers. So he was on some kind of stimulants. They could make him impossible to work.”
2025-07-22 · Founders · #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT