Now fully updated, The Piranha Club is the first serious study of Formula One's most intriguing and influential figures – the men who wield the real power. It is an entertaining and incisive analysis of the Formula One paddock, explaining how it works, who runs it, how it makes money and what sort of people exist there.
Formula One is the meeting point of sport, commerce, showbusiness, technology, industry and international politics. You are as likely to share a table for lunch in the paddock with Naomi Campbell or Michael Douglas as with a politician, a royal or a pop singer. Those who run it are the most intriguing of all: Bernie Ecclestone and Max Moseley, Jackie Stewart, Ron Dennis, Frank Williams, Eddie Jordan and the rest. Though from various backgrounds, they share the common interest of Formula One motor racing – and finding a way of making money successfully.
When Eddie Jordan attended his first meeting as a member of the elite organisation of Formula One team owners, he was greeted by the words, 'Welcome to the Piranha Club' and a broad and ironic grin. If Jordan thought the message was a joke, he was soon to learn otherwise.
In Grand Prix motor racing, life is lived in the fast lane in every sense. Only the fittest survive. It may be the most technologically advanced, most compelling, extravagant and glamorous sport on earth, but it also remains firmly Darwinian.
This is the story of how this exclusive club - beset by arguments and intrigues, chicanery and controversy - continues to stay beyond the reach of the lawyers and command a television audience that leaves other sports green with envy.
In The Piranha Club, Timothy Collings goes behind the scenes in the Formula One paddock and talks to the men at the heart of the business within the sport. He analyses the development of a unique television sports show which straddles news, gossip, industry and high finance, and profiles the characters who haunt its corridors of power. He strips away the glitz and greasepaint of the pit lane and paddock to introduce the reality of men like Bernie Ecclestone, Max Moseley, Frank Williams, ROn Dennis Eddie Jordan and Flavio Briatore.
It is a tale of danger and risk-taking, of plots and arguments and, above all, of a resounding level of ambition and energy that reveals how colourful and thrilling are the lives of Formula One's major movers and shakers. The dictionary tells us a piranha is a predatory South American fresh-water fish, noted for its voracity. The Piranha Club explains why Jordan was met with such an alarming greeting.
