Image via Tom Hartley Jnr Ltd/YouTube
Bernie Ecclestone spent four decades mastering contracts most people in motorsport couldn’t parse: broadcast rights, circuit-hosting fees, and sponsorship packages that reshaped how the world watches Formula 1. A customs form for a shotgun turned out to be the paperwork that finally got him.
What Actually Happened at Tires Aerodrome
On Monday, September 7, 2026, the 95-year-old former Formula One boss landed his private jet at Tires Aerodrome, a small airfield near Cascais outside Lisbon, arriving from Switzerland. He had already passed through general customs without any issue when an officer from the Portuguese Public Security Police‘s airport division separately searched his bag and found a shotgun with no import paperwork attached to it. Ecclestone says he had brought the gun over for a clay-pigeon shooting event scheduled in Portugal that weekend.
Police told him he was missing what is locally known as a “blue book,” the documentation required to bring a firearm into the country, and said he would be arrested over it. The standoff dragged on for what Ecclestone described as hours, calling it “wall-to-wall aggravation.” It was resolved only after his wife, Fabiana Flosi, flew to Lisbon accompanied by a customs official to hand the shotgun over to authorities and sign the paperwork Ecclestone had not brought with him in the first place.
Arrested, Detained, or Somewhere In Between
Whether this technically counted as an arrest depends on who is describing it. Portuguese outlets initially reported an arrest, citing police sources. Ecclestone disputes that framing, and so does a spokesperson for the PSP, who pushed back on the specific claim that its officers made an arrest. What both sides agree on is that he was held at the airport for an extended stretch, the shotgun was confiscated, and he left Portugal without it.
The Document He Keeps Leaving at Home
The “blue book” is shorthand for the European Firearms Pass, a document created under the EU’s Firearms Directive so hunters and sport shooters can move their own guns across Schengen borders without applying for a fresh import license every time they cross a line on a map. Switzerland sits outside the EU but inside the Schengen area and recognizes the same pass system, meaning the document Ecclestone needed wasn’t some obscure Portuguese bureaucratic quirk. It’s the entire legal mechanism that makes a weekend of clay-pigeon shooting possible without a criminal charge attached to it.
Flying private doesn’t shortcut any of it. A private jet skips the queues and pat-downs of a commercial terminal, but customs declarations and firearms checks run on a separate track that applies no matter how a passenger arrives. Ecclestone’s own account, that he cleared general customs and only ran into trouble when an officer separately searched his bag afterward, illustrates how firearms get flagged and processed independently of everything else moving through an airport.
This Isn’t His First Gun Trouble
Portugal wasn’t the first time an unlicensed firearm interrupted Ecclestone’s travel plans. In May 2022, he was stopped at Viracopos International Airport near Sao Paulo, Brazil, after security found an unregistered .32-caliber handgun in his bag as he prepared to board a private flight to Switzerland. He said afterward that he hadn’t realized the gun was packed in his luggage, dismissed the incident as minor, and paid 6,060 Brazilian reals, roughly $1,260 at the time, in bail before he was allowed to leave the country. Two firearms stops in four years, on two continents, is a harder pattern to write off as coincidence than either incident is on its own.
The Bigger Picture
There’s something genuinely strange about a man who built his fortune on being the only person in the room who fully understood the paperwork getting tripped up twice by a form. Ecclestone bought up Formula 1’s television rights in the late 1970s and ran the sport’s commercial operation from 1987 until he was pushed out in 2017, a business model current F1 teams are still living off of. He’s since sold off pieces of his own past, including a chunk of his personal race car collection, while his wife Fabiana Flosi continues serving as a vice president for sport within the FIA, the governing body that just spent the past year rewriting its own leadership term limits under president Mohammed Ben Sulayem.
None of that experience, apparently, extends to remembering a firearms permit. For anyone flying private with a sporting gun in tow, the practical lesson is straightforward: a European Firearms Pass or equivalent import documentation isn’t optional paperwork you can talk your way around at customs, even if you personally know everyone working the desk. Portugal can seize an undocumented weapon and refer the matter for prosecution regardless of whether the gun itself was legally owned back home. Ecclestone still keeps a home in Cascais and says he intends to keep splitting time between there and Switzerland, which means whatever system he adopts for that blue book going forward is worth paying attention to.
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