Bernie Ecclestone Stopped in Portugal with Shotgun

Bernie Ecclestone’s latest brush with the law did not happen in a boardroom or a courtroom, but on the tarmac of a small Portuguese airfield.

The 95-year-old former Formula One boss was stopped by police at Tires airfield, near the coastal resort of Cascais outside Lisbon, on Monday after authorities discovered he had brought a shotgun into the country on his private jet without the proper documentation.

Ecclestone, speaking by phone from Portugal, said he had flown in from Switzerland with the gun for a clay pigeon shooting event and believed it was a straightforward trip. It was not.

He admitted he did not have the required “blue book” needed to import the weapon into Portugal. That missing paperwork turned what he described as a routine journey into what he called “unnecessary aggravation”.

Ecclestone had landed with his wife, Fabiana, a vice-president for sport at Formula One’s governing body. The couple arrived at the small Tires airfield rather than Lisbon’s main international airport, heading for the nearby resort area where Ecclestone owns a home.

According to his account, he passed through customs without incident. Then the questions started.

Police, conducting what Portuguese newspapers later described as a routine check, discovered the shotgun and asked for documentation. Ecclestone could not provide it. He does not speak Portuguese, which hardly helped as the situation escalated into a formal intervention by the authorities.

The solution came via his Brazilian-born wife. Fabiana travelled to Lisbon with a customs official to hand the gun over to the authorities. Only then did the episode begin to unwind.

“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.”

Local media first broke the story, citing police sources who said the shotgun had been found during standard controls. There was no suggestion of any wider investigation beyond the firearm issue, but the incident again placed Ecclestone’s name alongside an unregistered weapon in an official report.

For the Briton, who once controlled the commercial side of Formula One for roughly four decades before being ousted in 2017, the scene in Portugal carried an echo of a previous misstep.

In 2022, he was briefly detained in Brazil after a small handgun was found in his luggage as he prepared to board a private plane to Switzerland. He acknowledged owning that gun but said he did not know it was in his bag, brushing off the affair at the time as “silly” and “tiny”.

This time, there was no such claim of ignorance. Ecclestone was clear: he brought the shotgun from Switzerland for clay pigeon shooting in Portugal, to use at a venue staging an exhibition over the weekend.

The gun never made it that far. It now sits with officials in Lisbon, logged and documented, while the man who once dictated the pace of Formula One finds himself again slowed by the fine print of international firearms law.