Motorsport: Riots bad enough, now ex is on the warpath

Bernie Ecclestone. Photo / Supplied

As if Bernie Ecclestone, the 80-year-old workaholic head of Formula One, did not have enough worries with shooting and riots in Bahrain threatening the start of the international season, there are rows on the home front because of a book.

Teams have left the fate of the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix in the hands of the F1 supremo after police again fired on protesters in the Gulf kingdom. The renewed violence forced Ecclestone to tone down a short-lived note of optimism that the March 13 race, the biggest sporting event of the year in Bahrain, could remain on track.

But the book, by biographer, Tom Bower, is also causing unrest. Bower has a track record of upsetting the people about whom he writes. Ecclestone, a working-class boy who became fabulously rich by bringing business acumen to motor sport, is thicker-skinned than a lot of billionaires. When he and Bower discussed the project in its early stages, the writer warned that if he turned up anything bad, he would use it. Ecclestone shrugged off the warning and replied: "I'm no angel", thus furnishing Bower with a title for his new book, which is to be published today. He even took the author around in his private jet.

But trouble began when an extract from the book appeared in the Daily Mail.

It focused on how Ecclestone ended his 17-year relationship with Tuana Tan to marry Slavica Maric, a feisty Croatian model who stands 30cm taller than the diminutive Mr Ecclestone and was pregnant with the first of their two daughters.

The former Mrs Ecclestone and their daughters did not like what they read, and the backwash has created a rift between the biographer and his subject.

Ecclestone has dominated F1 for decades, turning it into a multimillion-pound business.

Yet, at home, his strong-willed wife was easily a match for him. They met on the Italian race circuit in 1982, when she was 23 and he was 51. Their stormy 23-year union ended in November 2008.

This is not the biggest problem on Ecclestone's plate right now. The Bahrain International Circuit was also to host the GP2 Asia series, but organisers cancelled the rest of the race weekend because of political unrest. Bahrain's authorities are insistent the F1 fixture will go ahead, but that depends on whether political stability has returned.

Four protesters were killed and 231 wounded when riot police drove activists from a camp in Bahrain's capital Manama this week.

Ecclestone said it was not for F1 to run Bahrain and side-stepped questions about whether the sport should contemplate going to a country where protests for democratic change were met with bullets.

Ecclestone is expected to stay away from next week's book launch party. Bower declined to comment about his relations with Ecclestone. The 64-year-old author has a long track record for writing "warts and all" biographies of rich men, many of whom have vehemently objected to his portrayals of them. Targets have included Richard Branson, Mohammed Al Fayed, the late Robert Maxwell, and the seamy side of the football world.

- INDEPENDENT