It is now several weeks since I recommended the book, Bernie's Game by Terry Lovell (Metro Publishing). I thought I should say some more since I now have more information.

I was not sent this book for review, I bought it, and, so far as I know, there has been no publicity campaign. I have not read a single review of this book and nor has anyone I have asked. It may be that we have missed them, or that no review copies were dispatched, because the alternative scenario, that there is a tacit agreement to bury it, is too awful to contemplate, yet I cannot think of a more important book on Formula One.

It should be emphasised that this is not a biography of Bernie Ecclestone though, of course, there are biographical details. The book concentrates on Bernie's rise within Formula One. It does not go into his property portfolio, which is considerable. The Lola-Ford-Force team of the mid-1980s, for example, leased its factory at Colnbrook, near Heathrow Airport, from Bernie.

I have heard that Bernie bought land around Heathrow in the early 1960s, when it was dirt cheap. Nobody wanted to live close to an airport. Then came the Boeing 707 and the package holiday and the value of the land went through the roof. In 1966, there were many trans-Altantic passenger liners (the Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, the France, the America and the United States to name perhaps the five most famous) but by 1968 they had all gone.

I understand through friends in the book trade that Terry Lovell had a publisher lined up then, for reasons I cannot imagine, that first publisher decided to drop the project, as did the second publisher, and the third. I am told that pressure was brought to bear. It is my belief that Lovell pared his text and went to a company that specialises in self-publishing.

It is my understanding that Mr. Ecclestone invited Lovell to visit him for an hour. I am told that the audience lasted for four hours. I believe that an agreement was reached which is why Lovell is able to quote Bernie. I am told that the book does not have Bernie's approval, but he does not object to its publication.

The early chapters, which tell the story of the young Ecclestone, read as easily as a novel. Bernie showed remarkable business acumen at a very early age though the story that the Compton & Ecclestone motorcycle dealership grew to be the second largest in Britain, turns out to be something of an exaggeration.

A friend of mine, a former driver, who is currently reading Bernie's Game says that the intriguing thing about the Bernie story is The Dark Ages, the period roughly 1959-1968. Many and, sometimes, lurid are the stories told of the time when Bernie was away from motor racing.

I offer an alternative scenario. When I worked for Motor Sport magazine, I wrote a feature on Vanwall's third driver, the brilliant young Stuart Lewis-Evans. Bernie was a friend of the Lewis-Evans family and it was he who bought the 'toothpaste tube' Connaught at the auction when Connaught folded. It was Bernie who sent the Connaught and Stuart Down Under over the European winter of 1957/8.

Stuart died from injuries sustained during the 1958 Moroccan Grand Prix and, when I spoke of this to Bernie, a quarter of a century later, he had a catch in his voice when he spoke of Stuart. Bernie allowed himself to get close to Stuart Lewis-Evans, to Jochen Rindt and to Carlos Pace, and they all died on him, Stuart and Jochen in cars, Carlos at the controls of a light aircraft. After Carlos Pace died, in 1977, Bernie decided never again to get close to a driver.

Time and again, Bernie is presented as a human calculating machine yet I know of a man with a sentimental streak who has also been guilty of many acts of kindness.