There is nothing quite like an arresting photograph. And the one that caught my eye last month was of Bernie Ecclestone snapped by a passer-by standing in a queue at a donut stall moments after he had been relieved of £652m by a court after pleading guilty to tax fraud. When asked about the case he replied he couldn’t say anything because of the “bloody lawyers”. It was typical Bernie, embodying both unimaginable wealth and man-on-thestreet straightforwardness at the same time.
I won’t go into details of the case but there was a certain irony to the fact that Bernie’s downfall (in a legal sense; the 93-year-old still managed to negotiate avoiding a jail term) came just as we were preparing our coverage of the upcoming Las Vegas Grand Prix.
A race on the Strip was always a dream of Ecclestone’s who saw it as crucial to breaking America as well as turbocharging global TV audiences. Importantly the street race would also enable him to break the hold that circuits had on ‘his’ show. His first effort back in the 1980s with the ill-fated Caesars Palace GP might have bombed but Ecclestone never gave up the ambition and even as late as 2014 was negotiating with Vegas powerbrokers about a grand prix on a street circuit around the city.