Bernie Ecclestone’s latest brush with airport security did not come on a Formula One grid, but on the tarmac of a small airfield outside Lisbon.
The 95-year-old former F1 supremo was stopped by Portuguese police on Monday after arriving on his private jet at Tires airfield, near the coastal resort of Cascais, when officers discovered he had brought a shotgun into the country without the proper paperwork.
Ecclestone told Reuters by phone from Portugal that the weapon had travelled with him from Switzerland, where he uses it for clay pigeon shooting. He said he was heading to a similar event in Portugal but did not have the required “blue book” authorisation to import the gun.
He landed with his wife, Fabiana, a vice-president for sport at Formula One’s governing body, and initially passed through customs without incident. The problem came once police began asking questions.
According to Ecclestone, officers queried the shotgun and demanded documentation, triggering what he described as “unnecessary aggravation” as the situation escalated from a simple sporting trip into a legal headache.
With Ecclestone unable to speak Portuguese, it fell to his Brazilian-born wife to help untangle the stand-off. She travelled on to Lisbon, accompanied by a customs official, to hand the gun over to the authorities.
“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 incident, citing police sources who said the shotgun was found during a routine check on the aircraft.
Ecclestone, a former racer who turned the commercial side of Formula One into a global money machine over four decades before being ousted in 2017, owns a home in the neighbouring resort area. Portugal is a familiar stop; so, increasingly, are awkward encounters over firearms.
The episode carries clear echoes of his run-in with the law in Brazil in 2022. On that occasion, authorities briefly detained him at Viracopos airport near São Paulo after discovering an unregistered small handgun in his luggage as he prepared to board a private flight to Switzerland.
He admitted owning that weapon but insisted he did not know it was in his bag, brushing off the affair at the time as “silly” and “tiny”.
Two countries, two airports, two unregistered weapons. For a man who spent a lifetime controlling every detail in Formula One, Ecclestone’s off-track journeys are starting to look far harder to manage.
