Bernie Ecclestone spent the best part of four decades in rooms where the rules tended to bend around him. At a small airfield outside Lisbon on Monday, they did not. The Bernie Ecclestone shotgun episode began when the 95-year-old former Formula 1 chief executive landed at Tires Aerodrome in Cascais on a private jet from Switzerland, carrying a gun he intended to use in a clay-pigeon shooting competition — and without the documentation Portugal requires to bring a firearm into the country.
What the Bernie Ecclestone shotgun incident involved
Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã first reported the story, saying Ecclestone had been detained during a routine inspection and that officers from the Airport Division of the PSP, Portugal’s Public Security Police, had carried out an arrest. Within hours the report had been picked up across Europe, and Motorsport.com relayed the Portuguese account alongside Ecclestone’s own.
Those two versions do not agree on the central point. Speaking to the Press Association, Ecclestone said he had been stopped and questioned for roughly an hour by four police officers and customs officials, and flatly rejected the suggestion that he had been arrested. The Portuguese police, he said, were “very helpful”. He had, by his account, gone to the officers himself and asked what he could do for them; they wanted information about the gun he had brought in.
The missing ‘blue book’
The sticking point was paperwork rather than the weapon itself. Ecclestone told Daily Mail Sport that he had carried the shotgun from England to Switzerland and on to Portugal for the competition, and that he keeps licensed guns at his Portuguese home. Customs, he said, waved him through without difficulty. It was only afterwards that an officer asked to search his bag and then asked for the “blue book” — the import documentation the law requires. Ecclestone said he never travels with documents of that kind, and described the hours that followed as “wall-to-wall aggravation”.
The gun was surrendered. Ecclestone said his wife, Fabiana Flosi, travelled to Lisbon to hand the weapon over or settle whatever charge applied, while he waited at home for the matter to be closed. He offered to go with her, and in the end did not.
Not the first time
For a man of 95, this is a strikingly familiar problem. In May 2022, Ecclestone was arrested in Brazil for illegally carrying a gun while boarding a private plane bound for Switzerland, and was ordered to pay 6,000 Brazilian reals — around £1,000 — to the local authorities. As the BBC noted in its report on Monday’s incident, that makes two firearms-related airport confrontations inside four years.
A long way from the paddock
Ecclestone ran Formula 1 for close to 40 years, turning a loose collection of privateer teams into a global commercial machine, before being removed from the role in 2017 once Liberty Media completed its takeover of the sport. He has had no formal power in F1 since, though he has never been short of an opinion about the people who replaced him.
The sport, meanwhile, has moved a considerable distance from the one he controlled. Its 2026 rules reset has produced a championship led by a teenager-turned-title-favourite at Mercedes, with Kimi Antonelli’s extraordinary Monza win from 19th on the grid arriving barely 24 hours before Ecclestone’s jet touched down in Cascais. One story dominated the front of the sport; the other reminded everyone that its most famous former ruler is still capable of generating headlines from a private airfield.
No further action against Ecclestone has been reported. He said on Monday that the situation could “be put right”.
