Bernie Ecclestone's Shotgun Incident in Portugal

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

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

Ecclestone told Reuters by phone from Portugal that the weapon had travelled with him from Switzerland, where he uses it for clay pigeon shooting. He said he had flown in with his wife, Fabiana, a vice-president for sport at Formula One’s governing body, intending to take part in a clay shooting event linked to an exhibition over the weekend.

"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.

The problem, he admitted, was simple and bureaucratic: he did not have the necessary “blue book” authorising the import of the firearm into Portugal.

Ecclestone said he had already passed through customs when police approached him about the shotgun and asked to see documentation. What followed, he described as "unnecessary aggravation", as the situation escalated from a routine arrival into a legal issue over an undeclared weapon.

With Ecclestone unable to navigate the language barrier, it fell to his Brazilian-born wife to resolve the standoff. She travelled to 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 broke the story, citing police sources who said the shotgun had been discovered during a routine check.

Ecclestone, a former racer who dominated the commercial side of Formula One for some 40 years before being ousted in 2017, owns a home in the nearby resort area. The setting was familiar. The script, less so — though not entirely new.

The incident echoed his run-in with the law in Brazil in 2022, when he was briefly detained for carrying an unregistered small handgun while boarding a private plane to Switzerland. On that occasion he acknowledged owning the weapon but said he did not know it was in his luggage, dismissing the matter as "silly" and "tiny".

Different country, different gun, same kind of trouble for a man long used to operating on his own terms.