Yahoo Finance Snakes Rose Up in Indignation: When Bernie and Max Ruled F1
From the July 2018 issue
Back when Detroit hosted Formula 1 races-from 1982 to 1988-there was a semiregular press scrum called “Breakfast with Bernie,” where F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone fabulously and extemporaneously displayed how many ways he could not answer a question. During one of those fact-free fetes, I found myself alongside Ken Tyrrell, then a Formula 1 constructor and, in his own way, as funny and acerbic as Bernie. I asked him about Bernie’s height. Tyrrell tilted his head like the RCA dog as he scrutinized Bernie standing on the far side of the room. Finally, he said, “Do you have a ruler?”
It’s hard for me to grasp that Bernie-the former used-car salesman-and Max Mosley-the Oxford-educated patrician-no longer pull the strings in F1. Although, I should add, both could easily reanimate as Ferdinand Piëch, reins of power yet in hand right after the world has finally, positively seen the last of them. I’ve been a lifelong Bernie critic, given his pernicious business tactics, but maybe Bernie as Dictator was the only way it would work. He faced, for instance, former FIA president Jean-Marie Balestre, said to have been a Nazi collaborator; Baron Huschke von Hanstein, a onetime SS colonel who fronted the German and Austrian races; and Max himself, whose father, Oswald, was the founder of the British Union of Fascists and whose mother, Diana, scheduled her wedding in Joseph Goebbels’s home, Adolf Hitler in attendance. So, there’s that.
And it’s easy to forget that Max and Bernie were long on opposite sides of a bureaucratic Berlin Wall-Max as FIA president, trying to harness the F1 teams to a Paris-disciplined toboggan while stamping out illegal traction control, and Bernie the provocateur at the Formula One Constructors’ Association, gleefully relieving promoters and sponsors of cash while facing bribery and tax-avoidance indignities. Bernie had been a conductor of the F1 bandwagon for 46 years. I’m right now trying to think of anybody I’ve known for 46 years.
Max, too, is MIA in F1, having preceded Bernie meteorically in career flameouts. Max, remember, was videotaped enjoying an S&M orgy with five women. Usually, four have been enough for me. The newspaper News of the World, which was famous for rarely printing any, broke the story and claimed that the ladies had worn Nazi garb. No way, insisted Max, adding, “It was entirely consensual, harmless and light-hearted, and ended with a cup of tea . . .” He bought a copy of the paper to show to wife Jean, surely a moment that qualifies for the Embarrassment Hall of Fame. “She had no idea that once in a while I got up to that sort of thing,” noted Max in his autobiography, “ . . . something I did occasionally when the mood took me.” In England, the leering and titillation just would not stop. On the Continent, Max’s F1 acolytes asked, “So what?”
A former lawyer, Max dragged News of the World to court. Its owner was Rupert Murdoch, for whom I once worked and who once asked, “What is it about car racing that people like?” (I was terrified of the Rupe, who reminded me of Donald Sutherland playing a deranged despot from down under trying to corrupt democracy worldwide.) In Max’s suit against the newspaper, he triumphed, then marched to the European Court of Human Rights, where he lost. His notion was to hatch legislation to assure that private citizens be warned of any story about to be published that might invade their privacy. Peter Thiel should have underwritten it all.
Around the same time and despite 40 years of friendship with Max, Bernie butted heads with him over money. Mind you, Bernie was then chummy with Murdoch, and it’s likely he was further pressured by the directors of CVC Capital Partners, whose backroom machinations in Formula 1 have never been comprehended by anybody on the planet, including-as history now suggests-Bernie.
Eventually, News of the World hacked into the phone of a murdered teenager, a ploy so reptilian that snakes rose up in indignation along the Thames, and the Rupe put a bullet between the newspaper’s legally blind eyes. At the time, if you phoned Max, his voicemail message was: “I hope you realize you will go to prison for hacking my phone.” God, I love that.
What I didn’t know was that, for nearly a decade, Max was the chairman of the European New Car Assessment Programme, lobbying for stricter crash tests, for modernizing freeways evincing high injury rates, for reducing sulfur levels in fuel, and for making F1 “carbon neutral,” whatever that means.
Today Formula 1 is ruled by the walrus-mustachioed cipher Chase Carey. In faithful F1 fashion, it is only Chase who knows Chase’s mandate. But I doubt he’ll ever supply as much raw entertainment as Bernie and Max. Gratuitous drama is welcome nowhere except F1, where it’s integral to the show.
By the way, Bernie stands five feet, three inches tall. Napoleon was five seven, give or take. Both were rulers, of course, though I still don’t have one.
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