Matt Bishop: The British GP 'prank' that backfired on Ecclestone and Mosley

Can it really be a quarter of a century since Formula 1 commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone instructed FIA president Max Mosley to schedule the British Grand Prix for Easter Sunday? Yes, it can be and it is, because time flies. In 2000 Easter Sunday fell on April 23, so tomorrow will mark the 25th anniversary of one of Ecclestone’s most egregious pranks, whereby he and Mosley conspired to render the UK’s most prestigious motor sport event a mud bath and a laughing stock.

The British Grand Prix had been a July fixture every year since 1951, without exception, and it would return to its traditional July date in 2001, with which timing it has continued ever since, other than in 2006, 2009, and 2013, when it took place in June, and in 2020, when it was run in August. But June, July, and August are all high-summer months in England, so the 2000 race is the sole early-spring outlier in the history of world championship-status F1 British Grands Prix.

Why did Ecclestone and Mosley do it? A number of reasons were put forward by the powers that be at the time. Easter was later than usual, they said, which meant that the Monaco Grand Prix would be delayed until June 4 rather than its traditional end-of-May date, because it should be held on the Sunday nearest to the Feast of the Ascension of Christ. The Spanish Grand Prix, which had been allocated May 7, could not swap with the British Grand Prix, they said, because an insufficient number of marshals were prepared to work at the Circuit de Catalunya in April. The French Grand Prix had originally been given a late-April date, but that had had to be changed “because of internal French politics”, they said. And the Belgian and United States Grands Prix had been reinstated, having at one time been excluded from the 2000 F1 calendar, so that made the British Grand Prix impossible to schedule for any date other than April 23, they said. But no one who knew how many F1 beans made five believed any of that.

Over the previous few months, Ecclestone and the BRDC (the British Racing Drivers’ Club, which owns Silverstone) had been at public loggerheads. Ecclestone was a man for whom presentational perfection was paramount. A lot of super-successful F1 people are or were the same. Ron Dennis was; David Richards was; Toto Wolff is. So it was that Silverstone‘s scruffiness irritated Bernie. What some of us found endearingly charming about the place, he regarded as unacceptably shoddy. “I like Silverstone,” he had said in 1999, “because it shows young people what Formula 1 used to be like.”

The remark was delivered with the heavy-handed irony typical of the man, for he has never shown any signs of being interested in the F1-related enthusiasms of young people. Indeed, in 2014, he berated F1 marketers’ efforts to target Gen Z consumers, saying: “Young kids will see the Rolex brand, but are they going to buy one? No, they can’t afford to. Or another of our sponsors, UBS? No, kids don’t care about banking. They haven’t got enough money to put in the bloody banks anyway. I’d rather get to the 70-year-old who’s got plenty of cash.”

“I like Silverstone, because it shows young people what Formula 1 used to be like.”

Alexander Hesketh had been BRDC president between 1993 and 2000, after which Ken Tyrrell had taken over. Both were old-school racing men. Hesketh – or, to use his full title, the Third Baron Thomas Alexander Fermor-Hesketh KBE PC – had founded and run an eponymous F1 team for which James Hunt had won the 1975 Dutch Grand Prix, after which he had gone on to be a government minister in Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s Conservative Party cabinets in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tyrrell was already 75 when he became BRDC president in 2000, and within a year he would pass the mantle to Jackie Stewart, the driver with whom he had won F1 world championships decades before. Neither Hesketh nor Tyrrell was as crafty or as ruthless as was Ecclestone, backed as he was by his partner in skulduggery, Mosley, whose patrician mien concealed a nature every bit as belligerent.

So the BRDC was slow to react as Bernie and Max piled on the pressure, and Silverstone would continue to remain a bit tatty even as new-style Hermann Tilke-designed super-circuits such as Sepang, in Malaysia, which appeared in 1999, were redefining what a 21st-century F1 facility should look and feel like. Exasperated, Ecclestone and Mosley decided to punish the blue blazers of the BRDC with an April date for their blue riband event. The phrase ‘April showers’ is a well-worn cliché for a reason, and that reason is that it tends to rain a lot in England in April.

Ecclestone has always been a lucky bugger, and it so happened that April 2000 was the rainiest April in the UK since records had begun in 1766. The result was chaos – not on the racetrack itself but in the car parks. Hundreds of fans’ cars were marooned in deep mud, for Silverstone’s parking areas were grassy fields with no hard-standing, and the enormous amount of recent waterlogging had made them impossible for two-wheel-drive cars to negotiate. Tractors pulled hundreds of cars out of the many quagmires, and cars were banned altogether on the Saturday, when the police mounted roadblocks and the car parks were closed in the hope of preserving them for the Sunday.

On race day morning it rained again, and it was foggy, too. I remember arriving at the circuit at 4.30am, to avoid traffic, and sitting in a dark and drizzly paddock with nothing to do and nowhere to go for the best part of three hours. But at least I had made it. Others were not so lucky, because soon there were big jams on all the surrounding roads. The pre-race warm-up session was delayed by an hour and three-quarters because the fog had prevented the medical helicopter from landing at the track, and the drivers’ parade was cancelled.

In the end, the race got underway at the appointed hour of 1.00pm, believe it or not, by which time the weather was sunny, albeit chilly, and the track surface was dry. The race itself was a good one, and the comparatively small crowd who had braved the conditions enjoyed what they saw, for it was won by one of four Brits who took part, David Coulthard, who headed a McLaren one-two, his teammate Mika Häkkinen just 1.477sec behind him at the flag. Michael Schumacher was third for Ferrari.