Eddie Jordan, who has died after his battle with cancer, was what would now be called a ‘disruptor’, someone who came into Formula 1 from leftfield and changed the conventions of the game.
His extrovert joking style hid a fierce determination and a great commercial nous. He had an audacity which made seemingly impossible dreams become real. There was probably no-one else who could have brought the Jordan F1 team into existence on a wing and a prayer and then not only survived but flourished, making waves on the track (initially with with Gary Anderson’s beautiful 191 model in 1991) and off it with his gift of the outrageous deal.
Back in 1979 he was a driver running himself in British Formula 3, having arrived on these shores from his native Dublin a few years before. He operated from former pig sheds at Silverstone, ducking and diving always. Along the way he’d considered being a priest, a dentist and actually qualified as an accountant. His potty-mouthed lairy persona could switch to hushed confidential serious tones when the subject of a deal came up – and he had the knack of convincing anyone he was talking to that he was doing them a great favour.
Some along the way felt bruised by some of those deals but they were usually done in good faith. Occasionally the optimism and contortions which made the seemingly impossible happen didn’t quite work. His ability to have several versions of reality according to what he needed from whoever he was speaking to could occasionally catch up with him.
After realising he wasn’t made of the stuff to be an F1 driver he stepped back from the wheel at the end of 1980 and concentrated on running others in his F3 cars, initially with David Leslie and David Sears. His ability to talk others into helping him saw Eddie Jordan Racing become an increasingly formidable force in Formula 3, epitomised by Martin Brundle’s 1983 season as they took on Ayrton Senna and gave him a super-close run for the British title.
Eddie Jordan Racing would finally win the British F3 championship with Johnny Herbert in 1987. The pig sheds by then had given way to a smart unit, albeit still on site at Silverstone. A move into F3000 with Herbert saw them victorious on their debut in 1988 and Jordan had by now moved into driver management as a lucrative sideline. His ability to do deals saw him place several drivers – Herbert, Martin Donnelly and Jean Alesi the most notable – into F1, some time before Jordan became an F1 team owner.
The move into F1 was done through a bewildering cascade of deals and probably only he knew how they all interacted. Any reasonable person would have described his project – which involved setting up a purpose-built factory opposite the Silverstone track - as commercial suicide. But history suggests that progress is invariably made by unreasonable men, those who don’t accept conventional limitations. EJ was one such. That he should be the man who gave Michael Schumacher his F1 break in that first year – and then lost him one race later – wasn’t even that surprising given the mercurial character we are talking about. But he surrounded himself with good people – Gary Anderson as his engineer, Ian Phillips as his commercial director – and it somehow worked.
The money which came with the Yamaha engine of 1992 rescued the team from near-certain bankruptcy, but seriously compromised its chances on track that year. From that time onwards, Jordan no longer gambled the house but concentrated on staying in the game and amassing his own fortune. But the positive volatile energy of the man was always imbued in the team.
"When he asked me to design his first Formula 1 car in late-1989, I thought he was mad and said no."
Eddie Jordan as remembered by his tech chief Gary Anderson
Along the way, there were some great years, none better than 1999 when Heinz-Harald Frentzen became a late contender for the world championship.
He left F1 after selling up to the Midland consortium in 2005, the team changing hands several times before ending up in its current evolution as Aston Martin F1. It’s quite something to behold that state-of-the-art factory opposite the Silverstone track and recall the pig sheds to which it traces its ancestry.
Jordan retained a very visible presence in F1 right to the end as a pundit who’d been there and done it and even if his sentences very rarely made any grammatical sense, his views were inevitably entertaining and occasionally even correct. If there’s a heaven, Eddie might be trying to do a deal to come back even as we speak.
