Bernie Ecclestone Detained in Portugal Over Shotgun Incident

Bernie Ecclestone’s latest brush with airport security did not come on a Formula One grid, but on the tarmac of a quiet airfield outside Lisbon.

The 95-year-old former F1 boss was held up by police at Tires airfield, near the resort town of Cascais, on Monday after officers discovered he had brought a shotgun into Portugal on his private jet without the proper paperwork.

Ecclestone told Reuters by phone from Portugal that the weapon was a shotgun he regularly uses in Switzerland for clay pigeon shooting. He said he had flown in with it for another clay shooting outing, this time at an exhibition event in Portugal, but had failed to secure the required “blue book” documentation to import it.

He arrived with his wife Fabiana, a vice-president for sport at Formula One’s governing body, and initially passed through customs without incident. The interruption came only after police raised questions about the gun and demanded proof it could legally enter the country.

What followed, Ecclestone said, was a drawn-out episode he described as “unnecessary aggravation”. He does not speak Portuguese, so the back-and-forth with authorities added another layer of difficulty.

With the dispute unresolved on the spot, his Brazilian-born wife travelled on to Lisbon, accompanied by a customs official, to hand the shotgun over to the authorities. Ecclestone said he then completed the paperwork requested by officials.

“So now we’ve gone through all this and the people in Lisbon have got the gun,” he said. “I’ve signed some documents as they wanted.”

Portuguese newspapers first revealed the incident, citing police sources who said the shotgun turned up during a routine check.

Ecclestone, a former racer who turned himself into the all-powerful commercial chief of Formula One for roughly four decades before being ousted in 2017, owns a home in the nearby resort area. The setting was familiar. The script, less so — but not entirely new.

The scene in Cascais echoed an earlier run-in with the law in Brazil in 2022, when Ecclestone was briefly detained for carrying an unregistered small handgun while boarding a private plane bound for Switzerland. On that occasion he admitted owning the weapon but said he did not realise it was in his luggage, brushing the matter off as “silly” and “tiny”.

Different continent, different gun, same veteran powerbroker at the centre of another airport weapons check.