Crazy birth of the Jordan F1 team: 'My driver was in jail!'

F1

Jordan exploded onto the F1 scene like few others – this month's edition looks at the new grand prix teams who made their mark on debut

Michael Schumacher 1991 Jordan

Jordan – a team which exploded onto the scene, and gave Michael Schumacher its debut

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Starting an F1 team is a precarious business at the best of times – financial leaps of faith, small groups of underpaid staff pushed to the limit and the thought of losing everything just to achieve that world championship dream is the order of the day, at a bare minimum.

Some never make it, others get to the global stage just to fail early on while a very select few actually become a success.

In this month’s magazine, Maurice Hamilton focuses on three teams that did just that. Wolf, which won on its debut, the Brawn outfit that claimed the world title in its single season entered and the Jordan squad, one of F1’s last great privateers.

Though it never won a world championship, the latter captures the imagination of many fans as the ultimate grand prix start-up, due in no small part to its eccentric owner Eddie Jordan, an iconic selection of liveries and roll-call of charismatic, if not slightly vulnerable drivers like Damon Hill, Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Giancarlo Fisichella.

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Jordan’s Johnny Herbert, No31, at Silverstone in ’88, battling Jean Alesi in F3000 – surely F1 couldn’t be much harder?

Oh, and it gave Michael Schumacher his debut too.

As Eddie Jordan prepared to make that final jump to the world championship for 1991, he felt it was based on sound logic. The team boss been successful in the lower categories, so why not transfer that knowledge to motor sport’s top table?

“A good F3000 team could probably sit comfortably at the back of an F1 grid,” Jordan said a year before joining the world championship.

“All you need is a decent car, engine and driver.”

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From left: Eddie Jordan, Foster and Andrea de Cesaris, Interlagos, 1991

That first car the Silverstone team produced, the 191, turned out to be one of its best. And it didn’t look half bad either, decked out in 7Up green – convenient for an Irish team.

Jordan had snagged the fizzy drink sponsorship after speaking at one its management conferences – being in the right place at the right time when Michael Jackson, who it was about to sponsor on a two-year world tour, set fire to his hair and injured himself in filming a music video, thus cancelling all gigs.

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The money went to Jordan instead. Luckily, the car, designed by self-taught engineer Gary Anderson, was as fast as it was handsome.

“You can tell within about two feet of leaving the pitlane, whether a car is friendly or unfriendly,” said shakedown driver and grand prix winner John Watson. “There’s just an inherent message that you pick up through your body, your hands, your feet. That car gave you what you needed.

“The 191 was very easy to get to the performance threshold – it had good grip, like an F3000 car on steroids.

“There were a lot of clever engineering and design features within the car. They ran quite large tunnels at the rear diffusers. The neat gearbox package gave the car a very good centre of gravity and weight distribution – it had a very good aero balance as well.

“And of course, there was the lovely little compact Cosworth engine. Some of the other cars of the day used V12 Hondas or Lamborghinis: big old donkeys! Heavier engines, harder to install, harder to control the height and centre of gravity.

Bertrand Gachot testing the new, unbranded Jordan-Ford in January 1991. Photo: Grand Prix Photo

Gachot testing the unliveried 191…

Grand Prix Photo

“What the Cosworth engine enabled Gary and the team to do was to build a pretty impressive car for a first time, from a group of people that have never designed a Formula 1 car in their lives!”

And so it would prove in Jordan’s debut 1991 year. The team had to run the gauntlet of pre-qualifying, as 30 cars tried to squeeze into a 22-car grid.

Jordan driver Bertrand Gachot bravely made the cut on the first attempt in Phoenix, eventually qualifying a brilliant 14th while team-mate Andrea De Cesaris just lost out due to missing a gear.

It would be the only time a Jordan car wouldn’t make it through pre-qualifying, all the more impressive due it plumping for Goodyear tyres, better for racing with, but more difficult to activate on those cold, early-morning pre-qualifying laps than the Pirellis, which all its back-of-the-grid rivals were using.

Bertrand Gachot (Jordan-Ford) in the 1991 German Grand Prix at Hockenheim

…and racing the pretty green Jordan 191 at Hockenheim

Grand Prix Photo

Not that it gave team boss Eddie much comfort, who was clinging on for dear life through the squad’s money troubles.

“It was just too stressful to say I enjoyed it,” he said. “Pre-qualifying was something you had to go through to realise how nerve-racking it was, trying to make the bank every time. I was on first-name terms with every bailiff in Northampton. But they were very good to me, because they would tell me when they would be coming. They’d say ‘Just make sure you don’t answer the door’.”

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The season would carry on in typical rock ‘n’ roll Jordan-esque fashion. The team had pace, was scoring points, and getting faster all the time – and then disaster struck, all tracing back to an incident months before.

“Bertrand was supposed to come with me to give a motivational talk to [those] 600 7UP executives [prior to the 1991 season], to explain a little bit about F1,” Jordan told Motor Sport in 2016. “I spoke for 45 minutes and it seemed to go down quite well, but I was hugely pissed off that Bertrand didn’t show up. What I didn’t know was that he’d been arrested in the immediate aftermath of his infamous altercation with a taxi driver.”

Gachot had sprayed the driver with CS gas following a collision, and after being briefly arrested earlier that year, was then jailed proper prior to the Belgian GP – cue the last minute Schumacher appearance “who came with £150,000 from Mercedes. People thought I’d been clever to hire him, but I hadn’t: I took him because of the money,” said Jordan.

Schumacher stunned by qualifying 7th on debut at Spa, but it was Andrea de Cesaris who nearly won the race for Jordan, hunting down Ayrton Senna before his engine gave way three laps before the end.

“A communications breakdown had failed to notify Anderson that revised pistons would consume five times the usual amount of oil,” writes Hamilton.

Jordan to fifth in the 1991 constructors

De Cesaris running for Jordan at Spa – so close to victory

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As it was, the roller-coaster season would eventually see the team scoring enough points to finish fifth in the constructors’ table – an incredible debut for a group of people were grand prix green in every sense.

“It would today be impossible for a team like ours to make the kind of impact we eventually did,” said Jordan. “I think it’s a terrible shame that young engineers no longer really have the chance to show what they can do. Modern F1 is a shadow of the way things were back then, when you could pick up an engine from Cosworth, Hart or Judd and do a decent job.”

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