Bernie Ecclestone Detained in Portugal Over Undocumented Shotgun

Bernie Ecclestone, the former Formula One boss who spent four decades ruling the sport’s commercial empire, found himself facing a very different kind of scrutiny in Portugal on Monday.

The 95-year-old was stopped at Tires airfield, near the upscale resort of Cascais outside Lisbon, after police discovered he had brought a shotgun into the country on his private jet without the required paperwork.

Speaking by phone from Portugal, Ecclestone said he had flown in from Switzerland with the gun for a clay pigeon shooting event, but did not have the necessary “blue book” documentation to import it.

He landed with his wife Fabiana, a vice-president for sport at Formula One’s governing body, at the small airfield that serves the coastal resort area where the Briton owns a home. Ecclestone said he cleared customs, only for police to intervene shortly afterwards.

According to his account, officers asked about the weapon and requested proof it could be legally brought into Portugal, triggering what he described as “unnecessary aggravation” over a gun he said he regularly uses in Switzerland for sport.

“All that happened is that I took a gun that I've been using in Switzerland for clay pigeon shooting into the country to do some clay pigeon shooting in Portugal at a place where they had this weekend an exhibition thing going on,” he said.

Ecclestone does not speak Portuguese, and it was his Brazilian-born wife who ultimately travelled into Lisbon with a customs official to hand the shotgun over to the authorities.

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

Portuguese newspapers first revealed the incident, citing police sources who said the shotgun had been found during a routine check.

For Ecclestone, it was an uncomfortable echo of a previous run-in with firearms law. In 2022, he was briefly detained in Brazil after security staff at Campinas airport discovered an unregistered small handgun in his luggage as he prepared to board a private flight to Switzerland.

He acknowledged owning that weapon but said at the time he did not know it was in his bag, dismissing the affair as “silly” and “tiny.”

This latest episode again places one of Formula One’s most recognisable figures under the gaze of law enforcement, long after he was ousted from his role at the helm of the sport’s commercial rights in 2017.