Eddie Jordan: F1's ultimate wheeler-dealer team boss

Senna would prevail, but Jordan’s squad had clearly been marked out as an up-and-coming one to watch.

“We so nearly won the championship because we psyched Senna, and he started to make mistakes,” remembered Jordan. “By rights he should have walked it, but it went down to the wire.”

The team would continue competing in British F3, winning the ’87 title with Johnny Herbert, before entering F3000 (then F1’s main feeder series) the following year.

Herbert and Martin Donnelly were the drivers, with Jordan again proving talented at securing the cash needed to progress – coincidentally his team would run in yellow for the first time, a colour it would become synonymous with.

“For the first round in Spain the cars were virgin white, not a sponsor on them, and Johnny put it on pole,” Jordan said.

“Camel were with Lotus in F1 then, but I’d heard they weren’t happy. So I got Camel boss Duncan Lee on the phone that evening and said I’d put Camel stickers on the cars for free the next day, if he agreed to meet me the following week.

“Johnny won the race, and a few days later we got Camel sponsorship for both cars.”

Jordan would win the ’89 F3000 title with a young Jean Alesi, and it was the Frenchman who advised his team boss that an F1 leap was possible after making a number of cameo drives for Tyrrell that season.

“Jean told me, ‘Look Eddie, I can only talk about Tyrrell, but it’s a small team – a bit like what you’re able to do with F3000,’” Jordan remembered.

“He said, ‘I can promise you what we do [in F3000], the way you go about it, the technology, the discipline, the people, the fun, but at the same time the controls, are very similar. I would strongly, strongly advise you to look at Formula 1.’

Prior to that year, Jordan had told this magazine: “I do not want it to sound as if I am making a casual and boastful comment, but I sincerely believe that I am as good as the people already there and I hope to be able to prove it.”

And so he would – Jordan would assemble what would become one of grand prix racing’s famous crack design teams, that would in turn pen one of F1’s most recognisable cars in the 191, decked out in a 7Up drinks livery. It faced an uphill battle through its first season in 1991 though.

“EJ said, ‘It’ll all be ready for you, a drawing office and everything,’” recalled newly-hired Jordan technical director Gary Anderson.

“But when I got there in February 1990 there was nothing. No staff. Zero. All EJ had was a little unit at Silverstone where he based his F3000 cars. So my first job was to build a mezzanine floor into that unit, with a partition and a drawing board.

“That was Jordan Grand Prix’s first home. Then I started to draw the car – just lines on paper. I thought about it as I went along, but that first drawing wasn’t far from how the car ended up.”

Anderson brought his former Reynard colleagues Andrew Green and Mark Smith with him, and the 191 they produced proved potent.

First with drivers Andrea de Cesaris and Bertrand Gachot, then a famous debut for Michael Schumacher and some wild cameos from Alex Zanardi, the team fought its way out of pre-qualifying to finish an incredible fifth in the constructors’ championship in its first year.

Jordan Grand Prix had arrived with a bang in F1, but the next few years were about survival.

1992 was ruined by the largely uncompetitive Yamaha engine, but a switch to Hart in 1993 and the arrival of Eddie Irvine and Rubens Barrichello in ‘93 saw life injected back into the team.

Across the next two seasons the pair would become regular points scorers. In 1994 Barrichello took the team’s first pole at Spa and first podium at TI Aida, and Irvine joined on the podium at Canada the next season when it claimed a 2-3 race finish – with Ferrari’s Alesi claiming the win.

“Afterwards Jean said to me: ‘Today it was a Jordan 1-2-3,’” remembered Jordan.

“Have you noticed how many Jordan boys drove for Ferrari down the years? Johansson, Alesi, Irvine, Barrichello. People ask who has been my biggest sponsor during my career: I tell them, Ferrari.”

From Alesi onwards, Jordan became famous for selling drivers on to bigger teams, making a pre-requisite in the contract of most of his drivers (if he didn’t manage them already) that he was owed a cut whenever a prospect moved up – again helping to keep his own outfit afloat.

The team spent the middle ‘90s consolidating itself as a midfield prospect, but it was only after a worrying dip in early ’98 that the team then had its golden years.

The Anderson-designed 198 was aerodynamically efficient but down on Honda power, meaning its then-driver line-up of Damon Hill and Ralf Schumacher struggled in the early races.

It took a trip to Japan from Anderson to secure the required horses, and the team came good with a famous 1-2 for Hill and Schumacher at an extremely wet and attritional 1998 Belgian GP.

“Damon brought a knowledge of how to win, and I’ll always be grateful for that,” said Jordan in later years.

The next season the team hit its hight-point. Jordan took two wins courtesy of Schumacher’s replacement Heinz-Harald Frentzen and were the underdog challengers for a title which ultimately went to McLaren’s Mika Häkkinen.

From 2000 onwards the team began a slow gradual slide. Big sponsors such as Benson and Hedges and DHL gradually left the team, and Jordan was unable to persuade Honda to stay on as a works engine supplier.

Giancarlo Fisichella took a classic unlikely final Jordan win at a monsooned 2003 Brazilian GP – in similar circumstances to its first with Hill – before Jordan sold the team to Russian businessman Alex Schnaider.

“The day the deal was signed Eddie sat in my office in floods of tears saying, ‘I’m a failure,’” remembered the team’s commercial manager Ian Phillips.

“I told him, ‘EJ, you’re anything but a failure. You’ve created a great team, we’ve all got jobs and you’re rich’.”

In the years since Jordan has worked as a broadcaster and occasional negotiator, most recently as Adrian Newey’s manager, overseeing the transfer of F1’s greatest designer from Red Bull to Aston Martin.

“I loved my time in F1,” said Jordan looking back. “It wasn’t work for me; it was a playground.

“Ron Dennis said to me once, ‘It’s just as well you never got serious.’ But Formula 1 changes people, and not always for the better.

“They think they are more important than they are, they have big delusions of grandeur about their worth. You could re-float the Titanic on the egos in F1. Maybe I was starting to get a bit like that, too.

“But it’s all crap, really. My feet are back on the ground now.”