Formula One is a world of clever people, and Bernie Ecclestone is the cleverest of them all. His unprepossessing title is vice-president in charge of promotional affairs for the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile, the sport's worldwide governing body. What he actually does is run grand prix racing.

Since he is both a senior executive of the FIA and chairman of the Formula One Constructors' Association, the body representing the competitors, and also chairman of something called Formula One Administration - a company which collects, divides and distributes the revenues from the circuit owners, race sponsors, television companies and trackside advertisers to whom, under a remarkable 25-year deal with the FIA, he is empowered to sell the rights to the world championship events - the Englishman is in a unique position: poacher, gamekeeper and lord of the manor too.

The arrangement goes unchallenged because it works so well, in the interests of so many parties. As far as the FIA is concerned, Ecclestone has raised Formula One to a position of pre-eminence virtually unimaginable before he became involved. To the constructors, he is the man whose subtle vision and tough deal-making made them part of the entertainment business, enabling the most successful of them to ride around in private jets and to contemplate the possibility of floating the whole circus on the stock market next spring, with an estimated value of around £2 billion sterling.

Like Fidel Castro, the 65-yearold Ecclestone seems likely to leave many devoted apparatchiks but no obvious successor. And, extending the analogy, there appears little likelihood of a voluntary retirement. His ambition is prodigious, matched only by his imagination. He is a complicated and subtle man who sometimes takes on a very different protective coloration.

He is the most easily identifiable figure in the paddock: no more than 5ft 4in tall, invariably wearing a crisp, open-necked white shirt and black trousers or, in moments of extreme relaxation, a pair of freshly laundered and perfectly tailored jeans, with polished black loafers and, in cooler climates, an expensive suede jerkin. His long grey hair is neatly barbered, brushed into a fringe above eyes that convey the impression of careful appraisal.

He was born in Suffolk, England, in 1931, but moved during childhood to Bexleyheath in the Kentish suburbs. His father was either a trawler captain or an engineer; perhaps both.

During the course of an interview in 1981 he told me that he had taken a B.Sc. in chemical engineering at Woolwich Polytechnic. He was already buying and selling motorbikes, he said, when he was 15, and worked briefly for a motorcycle dealer before going into partnership in a garage in Bexleyheath. After buying out his partner he built up the business until it became the third-largest operation of its type in Britain.

It made him rich enough to indulge his fondness for motor sport, first racing motorbikes, then competing in the tiny Formula Three cars of the early 1950s powered by 500cc motorcycle engines, alongside such rising stars as Stirling Moss and Peter Collins. He also met and befriended a young driver named Stuart LewisEvans, whose father also ran a garage in Bexleyheath.

When an accident at Brands Hatch made Ecclestone reconsider his future as a driver, he began to follow Lewis-Evans around the circuits, watching him develop into a grand prix driver with the small Connaught team and, later, the championship-winning Vanwall outfit.

Ecclestone enjoyed his new role as travelling fan, but he wanted a greater involvement. A plan to build a team around Lewis-Evans perished along with the driver in the 1958 Moroccan Grand Prix. For a while he retreated back into business, expanding to include property development and a finance company. At some point he disposed completely of his businesses, in a single deal which made him very wealthy indeed.

But his interest in racing remained keen, and while he was absent from the grand prix scene he used his time to run teams in other kinds of racing, notably motorbikes. In the 1970s, however, he found a replacement for LewisEvans in the Austrian driver Jochen Rindt, an aggressive and charismatic character who put the management of his career in Ecclestone's hands.

But towards the end of the 1970 season, when Rindt was about to win the world championship, he crashed badly during a practice session at Monza. Ecclestone, who was in the pits, broke through the cordon and ran down the track to the wrecked Lotus. By the time he arrived, Rindt had been taken away in an ambulance. Ecclestone found his way to the hospital, but Rindt was already dead.

This second tragedy did not deter him. A year later he bought the entire assets of the troubled Brabham team, spent a lot of money on new cars and drivers, including Graham Hill, and waited for their fortunes to turn.

In 1974, after Hill had left to start his own team, a young Brazilian, Carlos Pace, joined Brabham and accepted the friendship previously enjoyed by LewisEvans and Rindt. The team won three grands prix that season, and Martini offered substantial sponsorship for the following season. Although Pace was killed in a light plane accident in 1977, its racing fortunes continued to improve. With new backing from Parmalat, the giant Italian milkproducts concern, the team won the titles of 1981 and 1983 with another young Brazilian, Nelson Piquet.

The Brabham factory shared premises in an industrial estate in Chessington, Surrey, with the Formula One Constructors' Association, also run by Ecclestone.

In exchange for a licence fee, FOCA had been given the rights to run and promote the Formula One world championship series and Ecclestone employed a team of people to that end, as well as to administer the business of transporting 50 cars, 600 people and 90 tons of freight around the world in chartered jumbo jets. He was already distributing the income and prize fund according to an arcane and highly-secret formula based not just on results but on the length of time a team had been in existence and on its past record of success.

This method, in a simplified and less secretive form, is still in use today; its benign effect is to assist the continuity of Formula One by helping small teams like Tyrrell and Minardi through lean periods. Thus, in this most highcapitalist of sports, is the immediate impact of market forces gently mitigated.

By the end of the 1980s, after winning a series of bitter battles with the FIA, Ecclestone had grown more interested in running Formula One than in running a team, and the name and effects of the Brabham concern were sold.

Now absorbed into the FIA and sitting as a member of its World Council, he was in a perfect position to expand the audience and raise the profile of Formula One, signing deals for live television transmission around the world and thereby making the sport attractive to a growing number of international companies with marketing budgets big enough to commit themselves to multi-million dollar sponsorship deals.

His associate, Paddy McNally, concentrated on maximising the income from trackside advertising through a company called Allsports Management. He developed the Paddock Club concept, enabling companies to buy corporate entertainment packages at each grand prix, giving their clients and favoured employees a treat in gigantic white marquees staffed by uniformed attendants serving champagne and canapes at a cost to the purchaser, in the mid-1990s, of around £1,000 a head.

Ecclestone's other close collaborator, the lawyer Max Mosley, who had been one of the original partners behind the March racing team in the early 1970s and then became FOCA's lawyer (and, therefore, Ecclestone's consigliere), eventually won an election campaign for the presidency of the FIA itself, giving the trio a practically unbreakable grip on the power over Formula One, and control of the proceeds that came from it.

The success of this enterprise can be gauged by the fact that, in the financial year 1993-1994, Bernie Ecclestone drew a salary of £29.7 million, the highest ever recorded in Britain. The following year's figure was down to £29.4 million. And the year after that he gave himself the biggest pay cut ever awarded, reducing his income to a mere £600,000 - a 98 per cent reduction which reflected his personal investment, believed to have been around £40 million, in the resources necessary to get Formula One's involvement in digital television off the ground.

Richard Williams is the author of a book about Formula One, Racers.