At the age of 59 the daredevil boss of Virgin Atlantic Sir Richard Branson is showing no sign of slowing up. Walking through the foyer of the Yas Hotel, his right arm strapped up in a sling he explains that he had an accident quad biking in the Pyrenees. "It's nothing really. I just hurt my shoulder and had a bit of keyhole surgery but I'm mending well and should be back on the tennis court by Christmas. Fortunately the quad bike didn't come down on top of me," he laughs. He's been through much worse over the years.
It's the eve of the final Formula One race of the year and whatever happens here in Abu Dhabi today he is not going to allow a shoulder injury to spoil the celebrations. Tonight he will throw a big party for the world champion, Jenson Button, and the Brawn team who have carried the Virgin logo on the front of their car to a triumphant and, as far as Branson is concerned, unexpected climax. He is the first to admit that he fell into Formula One by accident and hardly knew a thing about it at the beginning of the season. He once drove one of the cars around Silverstone in a celebrity race and says the he came so far last that he hoped people would think he was in the lead.
Branson's Formula One adventure started with a phone call from a young friend of his daughter Holly, 25, who was a test driver for Honda. "He told me that because of the global recession Honda were pulling out and the first race of the season was that week. "They needed $1million (Dh3.7m) in order to get the team to Australia. I've always been interested in F1 and I knew the CEO, so gave him a ring and said I would support the team and get them to Australia, and if they did well they would have no problems getting sponsorship after that. Obviously I wanted them to carry the Virgin brand. We shook hands on the deal on a Thursday morning, I went home, packed my suitcase full of Virgin stickers, arrived in Australia and stuck them all over the car. And the team came first and second. It's just been amazing."
As with so many other aspects of Branson's life, he was attracted to the comparatively small and little- known Brawn team because it was the underdog. "It's the David and Goliath thing again. That has always appealed to me," he says. And although he is unlikely to sponsor Brawn next season he has clearly been bitten by the Formula One bug and will be making an announcement "in a month or two" about which car will bear the Virgin logo in 2010.
"We aren't saying yet but we're not going to write out a cheque for $60million (Dh222m) for a second year. All I can say is that we have had a spectacular year with Brawn. I love building things from scratch and supporting the underdog team. We're going to enjoy a massive party on Sunday night for Jenson and I'm glad Virgin was able to play a part in their success. On Monday we will then decide whether to do it again."
The Virgin brand has enjoyed a huge boost from the association with the glamorous world of motor racing, although Branson admits that this is hard to quantify. "One billion people watch it. People are fanatical about it, especially young men, which is something I really had no idea about. It's all part of painting a picture. Virgin is now a global brand, we are in the top 10 global brands and we have always hit above our weight. Formula One adds to the sexiness of the brand."
Branson's schedule over the past fortnight has been as hectic as ever. Two weeks ago he was in Los Angeles sharing a stage with the Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver, addressing 20,000 women at the International Women's Media Foundation. Then there was a celebration for his mother Eve's 87th birthday. His father Ted is 92. Three days in Turkey followed for a meeting of The Elders, the group of high-profile names including Nelson Mandela, Peter Gabriel, Kofi Annan, Al Gore and Archbishop Desmond Tutu that meet intermittently to attempt to thrash out solutions to potential world conflicts.
"The idea of The Elders is to go into conflict regions and try to use their moral authority to bring conflicts to an end. They are a wonderful group of people. Last year Kofi Annan and Archbishop Tutu were able to go into Kenya and knock heads together and helped to set up a coalition government. " Soon Branson flies to Qatar for meetings with members of the Qatari royal family, then on to Milan and Rome where his health-club chain Virgin Active is particularly successful.
Some time in the next three or four months, he will be back in Abu Dhabi for the first step in the creation of his grandest plan yet: the first Virgin Galactic space port where space travellers will embark. "We're thrilled to be doing this here. Abu Dhabi is spectacular," he says. The 59-year-old entrepreneur is a very different creature from the brash young public-school boy who set off at the age of 17 to build a global business empire, starting in the record industry and building his brand with a succession of personal high-risk adventures including power-boating across the Atlantic and crossing both the Atlantic and the Pacific in hot-air balloons.
These days he is more concerned with the environment and world issues and determined to use his incredible energy and authority as a force for good. "I'm still an adventurer," he says. "But I'm using my resources and profile to try and tackle some of the seemingly intractable problems of the world, rather than just building new businesses and having fun. "I've just had a breakfast meeting about the idea of creating a 'carbon war room'. If global warming is the threat that all the experts believe it to be, then it will be worse than the First, Second and Third World Wars rolled into one so there needs to be a war room. It's an extension of the Earth Prize. The carbon war room was set up in America and is looking at every industry to see if it can help.
"It is considering practical suggestions to reduce carbon output and looking at radical re-engineering ideas to see if there is any way of extracting carbon. One idea they have come up with is called biochar. You take the waste product in a farmer's fields and give the farmer a machine which turns it into charcoal, which you crush up and bury back into the soil. If every farmer in the world was to do that, all the carbon outputs from planes, cars and buses every year would be equalled out by reburying it.
"Rather than saying you can't do this and you can't do that, we are looking for solutions. I'm particularly conscious of it because of the airline. That's one of the reasons I'm doing it. I have to balance my books," he says. He is taking the same principles into his Formula One commitment. "We have a fuel that we think works for F1 that is going to be called the Virgin Fuel," he explains. "It's a derivative of isobutanol [an organic compound that some scientists believe can offer an alternative to fossil fuels]. There's no reason why all cars shouldn't be run on isobutanol. We're doing a bit of lobbying with F1 and I think that within the next year or two they will be brave and move over to it. What they have said is that there must be a market for whatever fuel the Formula One cars use. What they are waiting for is for a fuel company to have enough supply out there."
With Branson in Abu Dhabi are his wife Joan and daughter Holly, a qualified doctor who now works for her father's company, and his son Sam, who is producing environmental films. "Holly is looking at new projects for Virgin involving health clinics. That fits in with her medical background. Sadly, I don't see a lot of her, although I do get to see more of her than when she was working as a doctor. Sam is just back from a three-month trip to the Arctic making a film."
Soon Branson will be going into training for the London Marathon as Virgin is sponsoring the race for the next five years, but perhaps his greatest undertaking will be the first passenger flight into space with Virgin Galactic, which he hopes to participate in personally. "I'm still an adventurer and space travel is going to be the biggest adventure of all," he says.
