Bernie Ecclestone’s been waxing lyrical about the good old days when men were men, racing cars were racing cars, not these new-fangled computerised roller-skates anyone can drive, and politics were allegedly some way off over the horizon.
The 77-year-old, who started his business career trading motorbike spares shortly after the war, didn’t quite go to the ‘when I were a lad, we went out to work on a dish of coal and a bootlace and felt lucky’ lengths, but still.
With a pungent whiff of smoke-filled rooms, he said this to the official F1 website:
“I talk often about the good old days, and probably they weren’t good old days. But at least we used to sort these problems out by ourselves.
“Nowadays every team has got five lawyers, three doctors, two masseurs, a psychologist, and all of them want to work. So if there is the chance to cause trouble, they do cause trouble.
“Without all these people the teams would not need to do all this and we would have solved the problems internally.”
He also suggests, amusingly, that the whole Spygate affair could have been sorted out if Ron Dennis and Jean Todt had got together on the phone for a nice little chat.
That’s a conversation we have trouble imagining.
He also has the grace to call Lewis Hamilton’s performance outstanding and adds, hilariously: “I always have been a supporter of the Polish kid, Kubica is his name.”
But you may ask yourself, as we did, why Bernie should be choosing this moment to air his thoughts.
There are two bits of this interview we think are particularly worth reading – his remarks on customer cars, which are basically “build your own, don’t race other people’s,” and his thoughts about espionage.
He says that there has always been a leakage of information in F1, it’s difficult to see how to stop it and… wait for this, that the FIA should stay out of it.
Interesting stuff.
Could this be his advance bid to get in his two-pennyworth for whatever is coming with Renault in a week or so? Only time will tell…
Read Bernie’s full interview here.
(Information from the Wikipedia article on Bernie Ecclestone was used in writing this article.)