Bernie’s Game

This biography tells how a street-sharp, working-class kid became one of the most powerful and wealthiest figures in sport. For more than 30 years, Bernie Ecclestone has ruthlessly exploited and dominated Formula One motor racing to become the third richest man in the United Kingdom with a family fortune worth #3 billion. To those within his elite circle, particularly those who have benefited from the labours of his wheeler-dealing, he is both feared and admired for the way in which he has masterminded the transformation of Formula One from an amateur sport of the Fifties into a global billion-dollar industry of the 21st century. But along the way there have been many, not only in Formula One but in motor sports at large, who have suffered at his hands – the weak and the gullible, the politcally naive and unsuspecting. They have a different story to tell. “Bernie’s Game” strips away the sexy veneer of Formula One to look behind the hype that sustains it. It opens the august portals of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, the body that governs Formula One, to discover the avarice, callousness and corruption of its rules.