Eddie Jordan and Jean Alesi boating in Sydney Harbour: Flashback

For nine successive years, the F1 season ended with Suzuka and Adelaide a fortnight apart. Sydney was a favourite place to spend the intervening weekend. This is the afternoon of Saturday, October 26, 1991 as Jean Alesi and Eddie Jordan take a boat ride around the harbour. It was completely unplanned – as such events with Jordan tended to be – and started when I and two colleagues, lying low in a motel on Pacific Highway, discovered Eddie was staying in a posh hotel on the waterfront.

Lunch in Jordan’s – a fish restaurant which, naturally, EJ insisted we simply had to choose – was washed down with chilled Chardonnay as we shot the breeze and, among other things, discussed Ayrton Senna’s extraordinary rant the previous Sunday. Despite having just been crowned world champion for the third time, Senna spent the post-race press conference launching a vitriolic attack on how FIA president, Jean-Marie Balestre, had favoured Alain Prost at the same race during the previous two years. It had been breathtaking in its content and invective-flecked delivery.

Jordan, knowing Alesi was also in town, tracked him down and insisted he join us for the afternoon. Despite being a Ferrari driver, Jean arrived without either an entourage or a camera crew (Sky and Netflix had yet to invade F1 and fill drivers’ free time with silly stunts for, allegedly, the viewers’ delectation).

Alesi and Jordan had heartfelt history. Jean spent his first year in the UK living with Eddie and his family in Oxford. It was Jordan who arranged the deal with Tyrrell to give Alesi his stunning debut when the Franco-Sicilian finished fourth in the 1989 French GP. Their conversation in Sydney covered many topics – but certainly not their respective races at Suzuka where Alesi’s engine had blown up on the first lap and Jordan’s two drivers, Alex Zanardi and Andrea de Cesaris, managed eight laps between them.

When the boat trip finished, on Jordan’s urging we went to the cinema to see The Commitments, the film version of Roddy Doyle’s riotous book about a struggling pop group in Dublin. Alesi did not join us, which was probably just as well because the raw Irish humour would have gone over his head – although he would have enjoyed, as we all did, the sight of EJ gasping for air as he slid down his seat in hysterics.

This year, the final GPs in Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi are a week apart at the end of a 23-race marathon. In 1991 the championship had 16 rounds – allowing time in-between to savour days such as this.