Smash hit

Mr Ecclestone would never want to be described as weak. He gave up racing cars after an accident, but he has retained a compulsive desire to win. “I have always been very competitive. Being small you have to be. I suppose it’s because when you’re a kid people would pick on you so you defend yourself early on in life and you just carry on. Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”

Although he does not like the word workaholic, he admits: “I hate holidays. I don’t spend much time on the yacht it seems a waste of time, I don’t want to sit there looking at the sun . . . My ex — I hate using the word ex — said I gave up too much family life for work. I don’t believe it’s true because I never neglected anything.”

He is still reeling from his divorce in March. His wife’s announcement that she was leaving him came out of the blue. “I didn’t think anything had gone wrong actually. I thought we had been very happy.”

His daughters, Petra and Tamara, have been looking after him since the split. “Every day I get a call saying, ‘Are you eating?’. I’m not a good cook but I can prepare cold things like salads.” He is also obsessesively tidy. “If a picture is not straight, I have to straighten it. I want all the cans lined up neatly in the fridge.”

He says that he is not bitter about having to divide up his fortune. “Slavica’s happy for me to have enough to buy food and things so that’s fine.”

It is clear that he is not planning to retire quite yet. “I doubt it.” But he admits that Formula One has been hit by the recession. “Everybody is affected . . . but Formula One has been going for 60 years, most successful companies will survive.”

He is dismissive of environmentalists who criticise the sport. “I was on the Fulham Road the other day and there were six buses lined up empty. I thought, ‘Don’t complain about us’. Thirty seconds of the Red Arrows at Silverstone use more fuel than we use in a week.”

He cannot bear the political correctness of modern life. Women, he says, just don’t make good racing drivers. “The G-force is so strong that your neck wouldn’t last one lap as a girl.”

Women, he once said, should be dressed in white and stay in the kitchen like other domestic appliances. “It was a joke. If it were possible, I would love to have a good lady race driver and preferably black and Jewish but they might take maternity leave.” He is more worried about racism. A group of spectators in Spain blacked up their faces when Lewis Hamilton drove last year. “If they do it again, I will go and find them and make them come and meet Lewis Hamilton.”

In his view the British champion had every right to leave the country for Switzerland because of tax reasons. “He hasn’t done well this year but not because he has gone abroad, because his car is no good. I would like to see the people earning most in this country paying less tax as it is an incentive. At the moment the harder you work the more you get taxed. The benefits culture is completely mad. I would get rid of it, there are plenty of jobs for people if they want to do them. These people are scroungers.”

Mr Ecclestone is an unlikely Labour donor. In 1997 his £1 million gift had to be repaid after Formula One was given the only exemption to the ban on tobacco advertising. “I am glad I gave money to Labour as I got it back. I thought Tony Blair was doing a good job at the time.”

Although he insists that Labour did not change the policy because of his donation, he became disillusioned with Mr Blair. “He probably told a lot of lies while he was there. They have to lie, don’t they, politicians? The truth is not always good to hear.”