It’s Oscars season once again and there is a lot of Formula 1 interest this year in one of the most prestigious entertainment awards given the huge success of the F1 movie.
The film that stars Brad Pitt, Damson Idris and Kerry Condon was co-produced by seven-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton and with a box office taking of over $633million, comfortably doubled its budget.
The 2026 Academy Awards, the 98th edition, will be held at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood in Los Angeles, and the F1 movie has four nominations including Best Picture, Best Film Editing, Best Sound and Best Visual Effects.
However, F1 has previously already had its form of the Oscars – although you may have to be an F1 veteran to remember the short-lived awards. In fact even if you were watching you may have missed it altogether.
Back in 2001, it wasn’t Liberty Media running the F1 show but Bernie Ecclestone and the F1 supremo decided to host his own F1 awards called the Grand Prix Bernie awards, or just the ‘Bernies’.
Now while I can hear many of you uttering ‘tsk, typical Bernie’ there was a really good cause behind this as the event was to aid iconic F1 safety and medical delegate between 1978 and 2004 Professor Sid Watkins’s Brain and Spine Foundation
Now if you think I may be stretching to associate these awards with the Oscars, then all I ask you to do is look at the trophies for these damn things (down below).
They could hardly look any more like Oscar statues with the only difference being these ones have a Bernie Ecclestone on them (of course) so we know exactly what territory Bernie was treading on here, but who were the big winners?
The 2001 Bernies
The awards were confirmed prior to the start of the 2001 season in an event at the Royal Albert Hall, with Michael Schumacher given ‘best driver’, which was no surprise given he had just won his first world championship while driving a Ferrari in 2000.
Jenson Button was given ‘best newcomer’ following his impressive debut season with Williams, the great British commentator Murray Walker was given a ‘lifetime achievement’ award and Sid Watkins was awarded ‘Outstanding Contribution’.
However, neither Schumacher nor Button were available to pick up their awards and this was partly because of the ill-timed event clashing with the calendar of the teams testing before the start of the season.
However, one driver did turn up and it was perhaps no surprise it was party magnet and F1 cult hero Eddie Irvine of Jaguar. However, many F1 world champions attended including Niki Lauda, Jackie Stewart, Jody Scheckter, Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill.
So it wasn’t until the Spanish Grand Prix at the end of April all four picked up their awards together. If you are wondering why in this article’s picture Button looks slightly embarrassed to pick up his award, by this point in the season he was really struggling to get an awful Benetton car in the top 10 and didn’t seem to have much answer to the pace shown by team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella.
If you are wondering why Schumacher has a really cheery grin, then he probably had already realised that he was driving a car that was going to take him to first and second places finishes in 10 of the first 11 races on the way to easily retaining his championship.