My top 10 highlights from the book:
1. When you live into your nineties as the billionaire architect of a massively popular sport, the public tends to get curious. But everything you need to know about how Bernie Ecclestone built the foundations of modern Formula 1 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.”
2. From his very first meetings with F1’s other team owners, Ecclestone sniffed opportunity. Enzo Ferrari aside, these weren’t exactly sharks. They weren’t as crafty as the gamblers he met on his regular trips to the casino, nor were they as cutthroat as the gang of used-car dealers he knew back in London.
3. All of it stemmed, Bernie thought, from their failure to realize a fundamental reality of Formula 1: the teams were only really rivals for a couple of hours a dozen times a year on the track. They needed to understand that the rest of the time, they were business partners. They could be a cartel if they wanted—they just didn’t know it yet.
4. Ecclestone had no problem making himself an annoyance, because he knew everything always came down to money, even when he acted like it didn’t. Enzo Ferrari had taught him that much. “You should never let people know you’re running a brothel,” Ferrari once said to Ecclestone. “You have to pretend it’s a hotel and keep the brothel in the basement.”
5. The FIA traded away its 30 percent stake to the TV rights for a flat fee of $9 million. By taking the guaranteed cash now, Balestre had no clue how much he was leaving on the table in the future. In a lifetime of questionable decisions, this was surely his most expensive. Bernie had beaten him once and for all. (I've heard these rights would sell for over $20 billion today.)
6. “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.”
7. What Colin Chapman realized first—and far more dramatically than any of his contemporaries—was that there was more to this racing business than pure horsepower. His mantra was simple. “Adding power makes you faster on the straights,” he said. “Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere.” His cars would rarely be the most powerful, but they would be nimble and efficient – built, above all, to outrun the competition through superior design.
8. 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. That manic energy, occasionally boosted by a regime of uppers, could make him impossible to work for. However chaotic the process, Chapman spent the 1960s producing a string of masterpieces, each with its own game-changing innovation.
9. “We always thought that if the old teams 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, why couldn’t we change it?” Red Bull soon established itself as the sport’s foremost disruptor, seemingly determined to challenge every unwritten rule and standard way of operating.
10. When Dietrich Mateschitz discovered how much the world’s highest-paid racing designer was expecting to take home, unsure that Newey was worth the seven-figure price tag, Mateschitz made a call to Gerhard Berger, Red Bull’s original Formula 1 driver and one of his closest confidantes.
“Gerhard, we have Adrian Newey here in Salzburg, but he is very expensive,” Mateschitz explained. “What should we do?”
“Well, it depends,” Berger replied, “on the value you put on a second a lap.”
Adrian Newey was formally introduced as Red Bull’s chief technical officer with the stated aim of building the team into a championship contender.
Listen to #395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 Into The World's Fastest Growing Sport on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
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