{"id":883742,"date":"2026-09-07T22:40:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T22:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/883742\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T22:40:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T22:40:15","slug":"bernie-ecclestone-news-motorsport-former-f1-boss-detained-at-portugal-airport-with-shotgun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/883742\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernie Ecclestone news, motorsport, former F1 boss detained at Portugal airport with shotgun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ex-Formula 1<\/a> supremo Bernie Ecclestone<\/a> was stopped and briefly detained at an airport in Portugal on Monday after police found he had brought a shotgun into the country on his private jet without documentation.<\/p>\n

The 95-year-old told Reuters in a telephone call from Portugal that he was carrying the gun with him from Switzerland for a clay pigeon shooting event but lacked a necessary ‘blue book’ to import it.<\/p>\n

\"Bernie<\/p>\n

Bernie Ecclestone and his former partner Slavica.\u00a0AP<\/p>\n

Ecclestone said he had landed with his wife Fabiana, who is a vice-president for sport at Formula 1\u2019s governing body, at Tires airfield near the resort town of Cascais outside Lisbon.<\/p>\n

“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 explained.<\/p>\n

Ecclestone, who does not speak Portuguese, said he had passed customs but then the police asked about the gun and sought documentation, leading to what he called “unnecessary aggravation”.<\/p>\n

His Brazilian-born wife eventually went to Lisbon, accompanied by a customs official, to surrender the gun to the authorities.<\/p>\n

“So now we’ve gone through all this and the people in Lisbon have got the gun,” he said. “I’ve signed some documents as they wanted.”<\/p>\n

Portuguese newspapers first reported the incident, quoting police sources saying authorities discovered the shotgun during a routine check.<\/p>\n

Ecclestone, a former racer who ran the commercial side of the sport for some 40 years until being ousted in 2017, owns a home in the adjoining resort area.<\/p>\n

The episode echoed the Briton’s earlier brush with the law over an unregistered weapon in Brazil, where he was briefly detained in 2022 for carrying a small handgun while boarding a private plane to Switzerland.<\/p>\n

Ecclestone then acknowledged owning the gun, but said he was unaware it was in his luggage, dismissing the incident as “silly” and “tiny”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ex-Formula 1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone was stopped and briefly detained at an airport in Portugal on Monday after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":883743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-883742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=883742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/883743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=883742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=883742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=883742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}