It was perhaps not the best piece of news for a 68-year-old businessman recovering from a heart bypass operation: the European Commission had just ruled that many of the television contracts on which he had built his billion-dollar empire were illegal.
But then Bernie Ecclestone, the promoter in charge of Formula One motor racing, is better equipped than most sexagenarians to handle stress. He has been the ringmaster of the Grand Prix circus for the best part of two decades, and, his health problems notwithstanding, is expected to run the F1 show well into the next millennium.
He has reached a position of unparalleled power in world sport through a combination of vision, ruthless competitiveness and prodigious hard work. Ecclestone believes the deals he negotiates benefit everyone in the sport: the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile, the sport's governing body; the participating teams, which every year spend tens of millions of pounds each just getting their cars on the track; the broadcasters that televise the races to audiences of 300 million or more every fortnight; the sponsors that plaster their names on 180 mph-moving billboards; and, not least, the millions of Grand Prix fans worldwide who follow every overtaking manoeuvre, pit stop and chicane shunt.
The Commission sees it differently. After almost two years of investigating the sport, its initial conclusions are that the FIA has competition, and that Mr Ecclestone (who is, rather handily, a vice-president of the FIA) has been the main beneficiary of many breaches in European law. More specifically, the Commission concludes that the FIA could not "validly assign" the broadcasting rights to Mr Ecclestone's companies, and, therefore, those companies "were not in a position to conclude legally enforceable contracts with broadcasters". Unless it reverses that opinion, the Commission will order the television contracts to be renegotiated.
Given that the £880 million sterling (€1.35 billion) Eurobond issue recently completed by London bankers on behalf of Mr Ecclestone's main F1 company is secured against future revenues from Grand Prix television contracts, the potential problems are there for all to see.
Mr Ecclestone will launch a vigorous defence of his business deals, but it is likely to prove a frustrating and time-consuming experience for a man of his entrepreneurial instincts. The son of a Suffolk trawlerman, he achieved early success as a motorbike and car dealer in Kent during the 1950s. He moved from selling cars to racing them, then on to running a Formula One team, and finally, in the early 1980s, to running Formula One itself.
Along the way he acquired his share of enemies, no doubt upset by an uncompromising approach to business and unmatched talent for negotiation, as well as an enormous amount of power in a sport that under his guidance became the most popular motor racing championship in the world.
He also made himself, and many others, extraordinarily rich, deftly exploiting the opportunities to make money from everything from television rights and sponsorship, to track-side catering and corporate hospitality. This year, his Formula One Administration company is expected to generate a profit of almost $200 million (€193.59 million) on revenues of more than $400 million.
Having banked most of the money raised in the Eurobond issue in a family trust, Mr Ecclestone is comfortably among the world's wealthiest men. However, money is not his sole motivation. He relishes the power he exercises in F1. The Ecclestone headquarters at every Grand Prix is a fleet of sleek silver-and-black buses parked at the front of the paddock from which he can watch through tinted windows everything going on around him.
Also, as befits a former racing driver, he enjoys taking risks. "I have always been a hustler - I like doing deals," he said last year.
An attempt in 1997 to float his FOA company on the London stock market was one such gamble that did not pay off. He had to expose to City scrutiny contractual agreements that until then had been kept secret; and he was ill at ease in a world of investment bankers and corporate finance lawyers. With the flotation dogged by uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the Brussels investigation, it was abandoned in favour of a bond issue.
Mr Ecclestone still hopes eventually to list his company on the stock market, but he must first overcome the European Commission.
It would be unwise to write off his chances of doing so. Mr Ecclestone has wriggled out of difficult situations before.
In 1997 he became ensnared in political controversy when a £1 million personal donation to the British Labour Party sparked a huge row because at the time the British government was considering exempting motor racing from a sports-wide ban on tobacco sponsorship.
The promoter was accused of buying political favours, a charge he hotly denied. Yet, he emerged triumphant from the scandal: not only did he get every penny of his £1 million back, F1 was also granted a seven-year exemption from the tobacco sponsorship ban.
Mr Ecclestone will be aiming to repeat that triumph. A few days after his heart surgery, he was typically defiant: "I'll only stop working when they're lowering me into the ground, and that's a long way off." Brussels has been warned.
