Motorsport's Midas man

Stallone and Ecclestone were soon to fall out

What F1 mogul Bernie Ecclestone lacks in inches, he more than makes up in the bank balance stakes. BBC Sport Online's Matt Slater uncovers how he does it.

Former colleagues from Bernie Ecclestone's days as a motorcycle salesman will have to sell a lot of bikes to match his pay packet these days.

The mop-topped billionaire has topped The Sunday Times Pay List 2000 rankings with high-octane annual earnings of £617 million - more than the income of the next three men on the list put together.

Nobody knows how much the secretive motorsport mogul is really worth - although EuroBusiness magazine, which is owned by Ecclestone, suggested £2.4 billion last December.

And at 70, the man who is arguably global sport's most successful impresario is showing no signs of retiring from the money-making game.

Ecclestone owns F1's TV rights for 110 years

Standing 5' 3'' in thick socks, Ecclestone has, nonetheless, managed to stand apart from the paddock crowd throughout his 30-year involvement with Formula One.

While many within the sport have personified the international playboy stereotype of motor racing, the Suffolk-born son of a fisherman has never stopped looking for his next deal.

Double act

His race to riches began soon after he left Woolwich Polytechnic with a degree in chemical engineering.

First, there was a successful car and motorcycle dealership in Bexley, Kent.

Then, after a crash ended his short racing career, he moved into management, first with Stuart Lewis-Evans in the 1950s, then Jochen Rindt in the late 1960s. Both drivers died at the wheel of their racing cars.

Having got his foot in the F1 door, by buying the Brabham team in the early 1970s, Ecclestone persuaded his fellow team owners to allow him to negotiate deals on their behalf.

Their agreement was the making of him and the sport's global success, then but a dream in Ecclestone's head.

He would go on to control the Formula One Constructors' Association, and from there the entire sport.

Now he is the most powerful man in F1, and forms a powerful and brilliant double act with Max Mosley.

Mosley is president of the sport's governing body, the FIA. But in the early 1980s, he was Ecclestone's lawyer in his battles with the FIA.

Iron grip

While high-profile team owners, sponsors and drivers have come and gone, Ecclestone has steadily increased his hold on the commercial side of the sport.

Benetton boss Briatore towers over F1 boss Bernie

Through a confusing network of companies, Ecclestone owns the exclusive right to sell and market the FIA's TV rights.

His hold over these was further strengthened this year when the FIA leased them to him for 100 years, as part of a compromise deal with the European Union, which claimed that F1 breached competitions guidelines.

In March this year, Ecclestone decided to cash in some of those chips when he sold 50% of his SLEC Holdings company to German broadcaster EM.TV.

While that sale did wonders for his net worth, it did not weaken his grip on F1. That iron grip is sometimes the subject of grumbling from F1 teams, but generally it is a situation everybody within the sport seems relatively happy about.

And why not? With Ecclestone cracking the whip, the F1 circus has become the biggest show in town. After all, it is largely down to Bernie's brains that team owners Ron Dennis, and Frank Williams, and drivers Eddie Irvine and David Coulthard can join Ecclestone in The Sunday Times pay list.

Golden touch

The growing number of car and IT company sponsors, the introduction of new Grands Prix in the Far East, a return to the US and forays into corporate finance - Ecclestone's $1.4bn F1 bond has paved the way for a stock market flotation - are all examples of Bernie's vision.

But while F1 insiders remain convinced of Ecclestone's golden touch, his dealings with those outside the motorsport fraternity have not always been so smooth.

Ecclestone has been accused of pro-Ferrari bias

Ecclestone's rows with the European Commission's competition watchdogs are now over, according to insiders, even if the EC is yet to confirm it. But they have plagued the sport for the past couple of years, and forced him to delay the flotation.

And his one brief flirtation with politics - via a £1m loan to the British Labour Party in 1997 - caused the new government its first major crisis when F1 was subsequently exempted from its ban on tobacco sponsorship.

Falling out

Ecclestone also remains something of a bogeyman for many F1 fans, who blame him for a variety of ills, some imagined, some not - the chief of those being his alleged pro-Ferrari bias and an ugly row over the future site of the British Grand Prix.

And Ecclestone would probably not feature on Hollywood star Sly Stallone's Christmas list either, after the two fell out over the making of an F1-based blockbuster.

But despite his detractors, there is no doubting the amazing way in which he has risen from humble beginnings to become the highest earning executive in Britain.

And even if there were, with homes in London, Gstaad, Corsica and the French Riviera, and a former Armani model for his wife, Ecclestone probably wouldn't care.