Bernie Ecclestone’s latest brush with the law did not come at a grand prix paddock or a courtroom, but on the tarmac of a small airfield on Portugal’s Atlantic coast.
The 95-year-old former Formula 1 supremo was stopped and briefly detained on Monday after police discovered he had brought a shotgun into the country on his private jet without the proper documentation.
Ecclestone, speaking to Reuters by telephone from Portugal, said he had flown in from Switzerland with the gun for a clay pigeon shooting event but did not have the required “blue book” needed to import it.
He landed at Tires airfield, a modest strip near the resort town of Cascais just outside Lisbon, accompanied by his wife Fabiana, who serves as vice-president for sport at Formula 1’s governing body.
According to Ecclestone, he had already passed through customs when officers raised questions about the firearm and demanded paperwork he could not provide. What followed, he said, was “unnecessary aggravation” as police moved to intervene.
The situation eventually shifted to Lisbon. His Brazilian-born wife travelled there with a customs official to hand the shotgun over to the authorities. The weapon is now in their possession.
“So now we've gone through all this and the people in Lisbon have got the gun,” Ecclestone said. “I've signed some documents as they wanted.”
Portuguese newspapers first revealed the episode, citing police sources who said the shotgun was picked up during a routine check. Ecclestone, who does not speak Portuguese, was left to navigate the process through officials and paperwork rather than his own words.
The incident unfolded not far from one of his homes. The Briton, a former racer who turned Formula 1 into a global commercial powerhouse over four decades before being ousted in 2017, owns a property in the neighbouring resort area.
For Ecclestone, the scene carried a familiar echo. In 2022 he was briefly detained in Brazil after security staff found an unregistered small handgun in his luggage as he prepared to board a private plane to Switzerland. He acknowledged owning that weapon but said he did not know it was in his bag, brushing the matter off at the time as “silly” and “tiny”.
Different country, different gun, same storyline: a man who once controlled every detail of Formula 1’s empire again tripped up by what he carried onto a private jet.
