My friend, Bernie Ecclestone

I’ve just finished watching the series Lucky, a brilliant eight-part insight into the working life of Bernie Ecclestone. Manish Pandey is the man behind it having penned the 2010 Senna documentary. Now as then, he has done a superb job of unearthing archive footage, while Bernie narrates his story as the only talking head in the documentary.

There is clearly no shortage of people ‘Mr E’ has upset in his life and there are things he has said publicly even in the past few months that none of us can agree with nor condone. But nor is there any doubt that, without him, Formula 1 would not be what it is today. The brilliance of a used car dealer who single handedly transformed a somewhat unstructured sport into something watched by two billion people per year is an extraordinary success story.

It made me reflect on my own relationship with and memories of Bernie so I thought I might share some of them here.