Night has fallen in Gstaad, as the beau monde defy unusually mild, slushy snow conditions with some opulent après-ski. It has long been the place for people-watching, this achingly chic Swiss Alpine village where you find a 15th-century chapel nestled alongside a Valentino boutique. “The last paradise in a crazy world,” Julie Andrews called it, while a former manager of the Gstaad Palace swore that he saw Elizabeth Taylor here with five different husbands. Today, the residents hardly come more recognisable than Bernie Ecclestone, who, at 7pm sharp as arranged, arrives in the lobby of the Arc-en-Ciel restaurant with his wife Fabiana and their four-year-old son, Ace.

At 94, Ecclestone still projects an aura perfected during his 40 years as Formula One’s all-powerful impresario. Just as A-listers and heads of state would once genuflect to this diminutive figure on a race grid, the staff at his local pizzeria have memorised his preferences, right down to his favourite cushioned chair in the corner. Not that he is in formal mode tonight. He has just flown in from London, having accepted an award reflecting his six-decade contribution to the world’s most cut-throat sport. “These lifetime awards, they’re a bit stupid,” he mutters. “Why don’t you wait until somebody has died? Surely we’re going to do more things before we die.”

When I suggest that it simply allows recipients to see their life’s work recognised while they are alive, he shrugs. Ecclestone has never been one to wallow in nostalgia or to be comfortable with extravagant praise. He turned down a knighthood in the 1990s on the pretext that he was “too busy”. Except the fuller story was that he felt he had not accomplished enough to earn it. “Whatever I did, I did for myself,” he says. “If somebody benefited from that, good. But it was never my intention. I thought these awards should only be for people who had captured a country, gone back to the Queen and given her the keys. ‘There you go, we’ve captured India.’

“I’m probably praised for a lot of things that I don’t deserve. I’m not looking for it, though. I’m not hoping that people stop me on the pavement. If they want to do it, good on them. What I don’t like is when they say something that isn’t genuine.”

‘I hope my son doesn’t look at me as the old man’

He orders his go-to dish, the Gorgonzola pizza, washed down with sparkling water. Given that he is battling a stubborn dose of winter flu, he avoids alcohol, explaining that two different doctors have prescribed a course of “rest, water and not getting aggravated”. While I stressed in advance that we could reschedule dinner if he was unwell, he would not hear of it, treating his ailment as a trifling speed bump. Two golden rules you learn in dealing with Ecclestone are that he always returns a telephone call and always, barring calamity, honours an appointment. Even when the eruption of an Icelandic volcano briefly grounded most global air travel in 2010, he arranged for his private jet to route around the giant ash plume in order to return to London from a trip to Shanghai.

Ecclestone expresses his philosophy on life thus: “Age is all in the mind. When you get up, think you’re 21.” It has been eight years since he relinquished his F1 supremacy, but he has stayed true to this core principle. In 2020, he became a father at 89, which by some accounts made him the sixth oldest in human history. The age range of his children is surely unsurpassed: while Ace is five in July, his eldest daughter Deborah turns 70 this year. Does it matter? To see him interact with Ace is to be reminded of any other paternal dynamic, as he fusses over the toddler’s temperature – he has been running a fever all day – and whether his colouring pencils are sufficiently sharp.

On the outside, Ecclestone is an unsentimental soul. He jokes that when the time comes for Fabiana to put him in a cardboard box, she should first ensure the box is DHL-branded so that she can make some advertising money (the Formula One sponsorship deal he struck with the delivery firm more than 20 years ago is still going strong). And yet when discussing Ace, or the precious time he has to watch him grow up, he betrays a faint hint of vulnerability. “I hope that he doesn’t look at me as the old man,” he says. “I try to be the way he would want me to be. He’s a bright little boy, so he needs to be treated as such.”

As the consummate deal-maker, hardwired to live in the moment, he almost never offers any concession to his own mortality. It falls to others to marvel at how he has sustained such a pace so long into his golden years. As far back as 2012, I recall one of his assistants saying incredulously of his work ethic: “82? For f---’s sake.” He is hardly slacking at 94. The only difference is that instead of crossing continents every fortnight, he has the kingpins of sport travel to him. One week he is dining with Juan Antonio Samaranch Jnr, a frontrunner to become Thomas Bach’s successor as president of the International Olympic Committee. The next he is entertaining Serbian business mogul Dragan Solak, the owner of Southampton.

But his 94th birthday brought a change in outlook. “You have to face up to reality,” he acknowledges. “When you’re 80, you tell yourself, “Maybe I can crack the whip for another five or six years.’ Then you’re 90 and you think, ‘Bloody hell.’ Now people say to me, ‘You’re going to live to 120.’ It’s all nonsense, obviously. What I don’t want, when they put me in the box or the oven, is to leave problems for people. Not for Fabiana, not for my children, not for anyone. I don’t want to leave any mysteries for them. I want them to be able to go on and live their lives as normal.”

To this end, Ecclestone has taken the extraordinary step of putting his entire collection of historic grand prix and Formula One cars up for sale. Together these 69 cars could be worth, at a conservative estimate, £500 million. Many, not least the title-winning Ferraris driven by Alberto Ascari, Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher, are impossible to value, having never come on to the open market before. Tom Hartley Jnr, the British classic car dealer handling the sale, describes it as “quite simply the most important race car collection in the world”. At least two nation states are already reputed to be interested. One, Ecclestone indicates, is Saudi Arabia.

A popular theory is that he is only contemplating this move after pleading guilty in 2023 to fraud, having failed to declare a trust that held assets worth more than £416 million. Prosecutors told Southwark Crown Court that he would pay a record £652 million to HM Revenue and Customs, while he was given a suspended jail sentence of 17 months. But Ecclestone has insisted this played no part in his willingness to sell off the family silver.

“It’s very easy,” he says. “With a bit of luck I might get two or three more years. And I don’t want to leave all this for Fabiana to sort. All these car dealers would be driving her mad. So the best thing to do is to get all the cars together and try to make sure they go to proper homes. Ace might not be interested in handling all this either. He might be more into football. Sooner or later, this had to happen. I’m still more or less in control, so I can do what I like. Maybe in another year I won’t be able to.”

He met Fabiana, a 48-year-old Brazilian lawyer, while she was working at the grand prix in Sao Paulo in 2009, with the couple marrying here in Gstaad three years later. The relationship has not been short on incident. In 2019, Ecclestone called me to his Knightsbridge office, where they disclosed how they had been blackmailed over the kidnapping of his wife’s mother, with the man responsible even seeking to frame them falsely for the crime before she was released. Life has since produced a subtle role reversal: with Bernie technically retired, Fabiana works as vice-president for the FIA, F1’s global governing body, in charge of South America.

‘Hamilton won’t last two seasons at Ferrari’

Not that her husband is shy of holding forth on the sport that he made his fiefdom. Take Lewis Hamilton’s £50 million-a-year switch from Mercedes to Ferrari, the storyline consuming the F1 paddock’s focus this winter. The two have often been mutual antagonists, with the seven-time world champion calling in 2022 for Ecclestone to be de-platformed over his controversial comments. Except Ecclestone, having since criticised Hamilton for everything from his gesture politics to his rainbow helmet, is no longer in any mood to soft-pedal his views.

“I don’t think Lewis will get the same attention at Ferrari,” he says. “Firstly, the team are happy with Charles Leclerc, his team-mate. Leclerc speaks their language [he’s fluent in Italian], so they’ll be looking after him. Even if Lewis does well, there’ll still be a lot of enemies, because he has suddenly arrived.” Might age – Hamilton is 40, Leclerc 27 – prove a factor? “I have my theory about this. It’s not the age with drivers, it’s how long they have been doing the same thing. I have thought with Lewis, ‘He’s getting tired. He has lost motivation.’ If he had never won a world championship, it might be different, because then there would be an incentive to win one. But he has won seven.”

As ringmaster, he understood Hamilton’s peerless commercial value. Still, the attached circus, including the driver’s outré sartorial choices and preoccupation with social media, brought them frequently into conflict. “Lewis gets himself up front in a way where you can dislike him,” Ecclestone argues. “How a guy who has won a few world titles and has a few dollars in the bank can dress the way he dresses… I’m not a fan of that. He has a lot of talent as a driver. As much as people credit him with? No, but still enough to win races. I don’t know why he does all this other nonsense. He needs to get out of the music business and whatever else.”

Even though Schumacher was never the same behind the wheel beyond the age of 40, Ferrari have enlisted Hamilton for a minimum two seasons. “He won’t last that long,” Ecclestone predicts. “Piero Ferrari, who has taken him there, still thinks they’ve done the right thing. I hope they have. I hope they haven’t just jumped in and end up wishing they hadn’t.”

As we eat, the snow falling softly against the restaurant windows, he remembers he has to call his daughter Petra to let her know he has landed. Among the Ecclestone clan, Petra, 36, and her older sister Tamara, 40, have rarely been out of the limelight, courting publicity through both their modelling and lavish property portfolios. But such wealth offered scant protection against last month’s devastating wildfires, with Petra and her four children evacuated from their £30 million Los Angeles mansion. “The house was very close to the Pacific Palisades fire,” her father says. “Her daughter’s school called her to say, ‘Come and get Lavinia now.’ She went and picked her up – and the next day the school had burnt down.”

‘Trump is a good dealer... Starmer doesn’t know what he’s doing’

In discussing events in the United States, it feels apt to explore his perspective on the re-election of Donald Trump. After all, Trump’s instinctively autocratic style, coupled with his disinclination to take no for an answer, has its similarities with Ecclestone’s own. “Trump is the best thing that could happen to the world,” he declares. “As I’ve said right from day one, he is a dealer. He puts it like this: ‘OK, you don’t want me to do this? Well, this is what I want you to do. So, let’s do a deal. I’ll back off a little, but you have to wake up.’ He’s a good dealer.”

They dealt with each other directly 15 years ago, when Ecclestone tried and failed to launch the Grand Prix of America, with the Manhattan skyline as a panoramic backdrop. One roadblock, he admits, was Trump’s insistence – as New York’s most flamboyant developer – on having his name plastered over everything. “I eventually said to him, ‘Do you know what? The only thing you haven’t asked to have your name on is toilet paper.’” Still, this shamelessness as a negotiator also earned his respect. “I would love to have had him as a partner in my used-car business.” From Ecclestone, the man who first forged his reputation as Warren Street’s finest second-hand car dealer, there could be no greater compliment.

As such, his expectations on Trump’s return to the White House are high. “Forget the word, ‘President’. He’s the chief executive of USA Limited. He’s running the country like a company. It’s for the shareholders and for everyone in that company. People who work there, he tries to look after.” There are parallels, certainly, between Trump’s pushback against diversity initiatives and Ecclestone’s repeated demands for his more activist drivers to stick to sport. “That’s what a good chief executive does. Trump wouldn’t be won over by, ‘My auntie or my great-grandfather did this.’ He picks people for what they are, not for what they’d like to be.”

Ecclestone, approving of Trump’s attempts to eliminate the “woke c--p” across US federal agencies, defines wokery as “people trying to make themselves look like what they’re not”. Portraying the re-election as a turning of the tide in this sense, he says: “He wants people to be honest and up front. He doesn’t want them to keep hiding behind something or saying things that aren’t honest. If he has got something to say, he says it. If it happens to upset somebody, that’s how it goes.” That sounds very much like a certain “Mr E”? “Yeah. You call it as it is.”

While he bases himself in Switzerland these days, Ecclestone has still kept his Kensington pied-à-terre. He just wishes, he says, that the country he calls home could be more expertly run. He famously donated £1 million to Labour in 1997, the year of Tony Blair’s election, leading to a scandal when the government later announced that F1 would be exempt from its ban on tobacco advertising. Today, Ecclestone exhibits far less enthusiasm for Sir Keir Starmer. “I don’t believe any of those people, including the Prime Minister, are bad people. The problem is that they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s like employing a dentist if you’re really looking for a heart specialist.” Does he worry that Labour could be easily outmanoeuvred by Trump? “Oh, it won’t be difficult for anybody to do that,” he replies. “They’re not bright enough to control what they’re supposed to be controlling.”

It is a sobering analysis to hear as the waiter brings us decadent Swiss chocolate mousse for dessert. Then again, he seldom sugar-coats his opinions on anyone he deems not up to the task. He can be intensely loyal to his fellow strong-men, but lethal to those he considers feeble. It is a key reason why so many of sport’s top executives still beat a path to his door. For the truth is that whatever you think of Ecclestone – and he could scarcely care less, six years shy of a telegram from the King – he still convinces as a font of wisdom, a force of nature whose like we shall not see again.