THE COLOUR OF MONEY

For nearly two decades the rule had been simple, almost romantic: a Grand Prix car wore the colour of the nation it came from. British cars were green, Italian cars red, French cars blue, German cars silver. You could read a starting grid like a map. Then, at the start of the 1968 season, the map dissolved.

The fuel and tyre money that had quietly underwritten racing was draining away — firms such as BP, Shell and Firestone pulled back their support — and the sport needed a new source of cash to replace it. The FIA’s answer was to permit unrestricted commercial sponsorship on the cars themselves.[84] With that single decision, the bodywork of a racing car became the most valuable billboard in motorsport, and the era of national colours quietly ended.

The first car to carry the new logic was not a works machine at all. At the 1968 South African Grand Prix, a privately run Brabham was entered for John Love in the colours of Gunston cigarettes — the first Formula One car ever painted in the livery of a sponsor.[84] A green or a red car was a statement about where you were from. A Gunston car was a statement about who was paying. Nothing about the sport would be the same again.

If a privateer struck the match, it was a works team that lit the fire. From the 1968 Spanish Grand Prix, Graham Hill’s Lotus 49B appeared in the red, white and gold of Imperial Tobacco’s Gold Leaf brand — making Team Lotus the first factory team to run in full sponsor livery.[84] The symbolism was total. Team Lotus traded British racing green, the colour it had worn since its founding, for the colours of its backer, becoming the first works team to paint its cars in the livery of the people funding them.[214]

It is hard, now, to feel how radical that was. Green was not a marketing choice; it was an identity, a birthright, the colour of every British racing car for half a century. To strangers it had said, before a wheel turned, where a car belonged and what tradition it carried. To paint over it was to admit out loud that the money mattered more than the heritage — and Lotus admitted it first, gladly, and won races doing it. The other teams watched, did the arithmetic, and followed. Within a few seasons the grid was a parade of cigarette brands, fuel companies and consumer products, and the old national livery was a memory you had to explain to children.

The car wearing all that Gold Leaf was no mere canvas. The Lotus 49 was one of the most important machines the sport ever built: powered by the Ford Cosworth DFV and using that engine as a stressed structural member bolted to the back of a monocoque chassis, it was both an engineering landmark and, by happy accident, the first car ever to carry a works sponsor’s colours.[107] The DFV would go on to power grids of cars for more than a decade; the 49 was its first home, and the first place the new commercial reality and the new technical reality met on the same bodywork.

If the 49 showed how far ingenuity could push the rules, the end of the decade showed how far it could be pushed past them. In 1978 Brabham arrived with the BT46B — the “fan car” — a machine that used an enormous fan, ostensibly for cooling, to suck the car down onto the track. Niki Lauda won the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix in it before the FIA closed the regulatory loophole that had allowed it to race.[215] The fan car is remembered as a piece of engineering audacity, but it was also a parable: in a sport now defined by who could find an edge — commercial or technical — and exploit it before the rulebook caught up. Brabham found one, won with it, and lost it almost in the same breath.

Which brings us to the man who owned that fan car, and who understood better than anyone what the 1968 sponsorship rule had really unleashed. At the end of 1970, Bernie Ecclestone — once the manager of the late Jochen Rindt — bought the Brabham team outright.[215] He was a team owner now, but his real ambitions lay beyond the pit wall.

In 1974 Ecclestone co-founded the Formula One Constructors’ Association, FOCA, alongside Frank Williams, Colin Chapman, Teddy Mayer, Ken Tyrrell and Max Mosley.[178] On paper it was a trade body for the small British teams. In practice it was Ecclestone’s instrument for doing to the whole sport what sponsorship had done to a single car: turning it into a business with revenues to be captured. Through Formula One Promotions and Administration, he came to control how the sport’s television revenues were divided — the single most important lever in the modern game, and he held it.[178]

The teams he organised were exactly the ones the establishment looked down on. Enzo Ferrari had a word for the small British constructors, who bought engines and gearboxes off the shelf and assembled their cars in workshops rather than casting their own from scratch: he called them the garagistes, the garage teams whose cars were built in sheds.[78] It was meant as an insult. It became, in time, a description of the people who took over the sport — because the garagistes understood money in a way the great factory teams never had to.

None understood it better than Colin Chapman. Where others saw bodywork, Chapman saw billboards. He pioneered the idea of turning racing cars into rolling advertisements, first with Gold Leaf and then with John Player Special.[114] Every square inch of a Lotus became something to be sold, and the look of Formula One — the sense that a car is a moving logo — descends directly from his choices.

Money on the cars and money in the television deals made one collision inevitable: a fight over who actually governed the sport. The dispute that followed is remembered as the FISA–FOCA war, and it set Jean-Marie Balestre’s governing body against Ecclestone’s constructors in a battle fought over both the money and the rules.[79] On one side, the sporting authority that claimed the right to make the regulations; on the other, the commercial association that controlled the teams, the show, and increasingly the revenue. It was less a sporting argument than a contest for ownership of the sport itself.

The man at the centre of it was, awkwardly, on both sides of his own table. Ecclestone was simultaneously the owner of the Brabham team and the president of FOCA — and that double role drew accusations that his own cars enjoyed advance warning of rule changes the rest of the field had to discover for themselves.[215] It should be said plainly that this was an allegation, an accusation that attached to his unusual dual position rather than a proven fact; but the suspicion was itself a sign of how completely one man had come to sit astride both the competition and its commerce.

The war was fought in the strange currency of loopholes and disqualifications. The constructors exploited a “water-tank” weight loophole — running cars under the minimum weight and then topping them up with water before scrutineering, nominally for brake cooling — and the controversy came to a head when Nelson Piquet and Keke Rosberg were disqualified from the 1982 Brazilian Grand Prix over it.[79] The fight even tore at the calendar itself: amid the power struggle, the 1980 Spanish Grand Prix was run as a non-championship race, held without FISA’s sanction.[79] A Grand Prix that did not count for the championship — the clearest possible proof that the sport’s two halves no longer agreed on what the sport even was.

The brinkmanship reached its most visible point when the teams simply refused to turn up. A FOCA boycott cut the 1982 San Marino Grand Prix down to just fourteen starters — a championship Grand Prix run with barely half a normal field, the empty grid slots a measure of how far the dispute had escalated.[79] The sport had reached the edge of pulling itself apart over the very thing that had been supposed to save it: money. Fourteen cars on a grid built for more than twice that number was a photograph of an argument no longer being conducted in boardrooms but on the track, in plain sight of everyone who had come to watch.

What finally ended the war was not a winner but a treaty. The Concorde Agreement brought peace by guaranteeing the teams a fairer share of the sport’s funds and an orderly, predictable process for making the rules.[79] The governing body kept its authority; the constructors got their money and their say. The framework hammered out in that settlement — revenue shared on agreed terms, regulations changed on an agreed timetable — is, in its essentials, the way Formula One is still run, and it is the reason the sport survived its own civil war intact.

If you want a single image for everything that changed in these years, you do not have to look far. From 1972 the John Player Special livery — black and gold, the most elegant paint scheme the sport has ever produced — defined Team Lotus, and went on defining it until the brand’s farewell in 1986.[216] It was a cigarette packet rendered as a racing car, and it was beautiful, and that contradiction is the whole story of the era.

The black-and-gold Lotus is also the closing argument for what Chapman built. Tobacco sponsorship, running from those first Gold Leaf cars to the John Player Special black-and-gold Lotus 72, became Formula One’s commercial signature.[78] The look that says “Formula One” to anyone who has ever glanced at it — the car as moving advertisement — was forged here, in the deals Chapman struck on the side of his machines.

And the deals did more than decorate the cars. Chapman’s advertising arrangements helped transform Formula One from a rich gentlemen’s pastime into a multi-million pound enterprise.[114] That is the real legacy of 1968 to 1980. The decade began with cars wearing the colours of their countries and amateurs racing for the love of it; it ended with cars wearing the colours of their sponsors, a constructors’ association controlling the television money, and a treaty dividing the spoils. The sport had found the colour of money — and it was black and gold.