THE JORDAN YEARS
Driven by a charismatic Dubliner, an Irish team took on the establishment in Formula 1 during the 1990s and succeeded against the odds
ON this weekend 30 years ago, Irish sporting headlines were dominated by Frank O’Mara who had become the world indoor 3,000m champion in Seville. There was also Dublin and Meath playing out a hard-fought draw in a National League match at Croke Park, a precursor of the summer ahead while doublechasing Arsenal had just drawn old rivals Tottenham in the FA Cup, which still mattered at the time.
The US Grand Prix garnered little attention, apart from the first chequered flag of the season falling to Ayrton Senna. The debut of a Formula 1 team from Ireland was barely a footnote, perhaps because one of their cars failed to qualify and the other didn’t finish. But that Arizona race-track was the first step in an adventure that, by the end of the decade, would become one of the biggest stories in Irish sport.
Not that anyone knew that in Phoenix. ‘It was an eye-opener. A wake-up call,’ remembers Gary Anderson, who had been drafted in the year before by Eddie Jordan to design the car – a sleek, green machine that was called ‘one of the best looking cars on the circuit’ by Alain Prost.
‘It was a dusty track and we had to pre-qualify. We were this small team, with a staff of 28 people, whereas all the other teams had 150 or 200 people working for them. That day told us that it was going to be a tough journey.’
Nobody thought it was going to be easy. As RTÉ’s F1 analyst during Jordan’s halcyon days former racing driver David Kennedy points out, bigger names than Jordan had tried their luck and failed. ‘There were 18 teams, so that was 36 cars and only 24 made the grid for each Grand Prix, so there was plenty of blood on the tracks.’
Everyone expected Jordan to be collateral damage. But they hadn’t banked on the charismatic Dubliner whose dreamed it was to start a Formula 1 team. Jordan liked to cast himself as an ‘Irish chancer’ but that disguised a savvy business mind and sharp eye for a driver, which he had refined during a decade in Formula 3 and running his own driver management company.
‘I never felt it was a pipe dream,’ says Mark Gallagher, who would become the team’s marketing and PR director. ‘Eddie had an incredibly successful team in junior formula and a successful management company with the likes of Eddie Irvine and Jean Alesi. When you joined all the dots together, it looked like Eddie could be a player.’
Still, there were parts of the operation that seemed out of sync with the glitz and glamour of Formula 1. Gallagher remembers writing the press release announcing Jordan were going to enter Formula 1 in 1991, and handing them out at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza the previous September.
‘That was how the wider world of Formula 1 discovered there was going to be a team called Jordan,’ he says, smiling at the memory.
When first approached by Jordan, Anderson had felt the car was only a design exercise and wouldn’t see the light of day. But by October, John Watson was testing the car he designed in Silverstone. And then Belgian Bertrand Gachot and Brazil’s Andrea De Cesaris were hired as their first drivers.
‘The thing I remember about Phoenix was the euphoria of turning up there, Eddie had achieved his dream of an Irish Formula 1 team with all these Irish people involved and then one car didn’t pre-qualify and the other didn’t finish the race. It wasn’t an easy baptism.
‘It took until Monaco when Gachot finished eighth, that we knew we had a good car.’
Everyone was made to sit up and take notice when the two Jordan cars finished fourth and fifth in Montreal. ‘That’s when we knew something special was happening here,’ Gallagher recalls. ‘We built our own podium in the garage, pulled down the door so public and media couldn’t see, and celebrated those two places as if it was a win.’
That illustrated the sense of fun that the team brought to what could be an overly-stuffy world. But as things improved on the track, there were other issues. Jordan was stressed out, trying to keep it all afloat and has said before that he was on first-name terms with every bailiff in England during the first few seasons.
And after 10 races, the team lost Gachot who was jailed for four months for an altercation with a London taxi driver. His replacement was a young German driver by the name of Michael Schumacher who promptly caused a sensation by qualifying seventh on the grid in his first drive in Formula 1.
Unfortunately, his clutch failed on the first lap of the race, but he had served notice of his rare talent and was swiftly snatched by Benetton and went on to win seven world titles.
Despite being a tiny team compared to their rivals, Jordan incredibly finished fifth in the constructor’s championship in their debut season, something that nobody could have foreseen in Phoenix.
The following couple of seasons were difficult, but by 1994, results started to improve and the Irish public began to take an interest as they finished fifth in constructor’s championship four years in a row.
However, they didn’t win a Grand Prix until 1998, when Damon Hill and Ralf Schumacher famously finished first and second in Belgium. The following season, 1999, was the high point as Jordan finished third in the constructor’s championship.
‘Eddie was a bit of a character and he played up the under-dogs thing,’ Anderson says.
‘We were underdogs. Even though the first year was very expensive for us, it was still very cheap in Formula 1 terms. We just did everything in a cost-effective way.
‘And we knew our car was such that if the big boys had an off-day and we had a very good day that we might catch one of them out, be it Williams, McLaren or Ferrari. That is where we were coming from.’
Towards the end of the 1990s, Jordan had entered the Irish sporting lexicon. ‘I remember a survey was done at the time of Irish sports fans and Formula 1 was the most popular second-favourite sport,’ recalls Kennedy. ‘Whether they were GAA, golf or football fans, they all said that F1 was their second sport. And that was solely because of Jordan. That was all down to Eddie, he made motorsport mainstream in Ireland.’
The world of Formula 1 is cutthroat and from the high of 1999, Jordan was finding it harder and harder to sustain success, By 2005, he had sold out to Alex Shnaider’s Midland Group, the team’s 14 years as an upstart upsetting the establishment having come to an end.
‘We can all look back on it with a great sense of achievement but at the time, we were in the trenches and it wasn’t easy. Eddie was under pressure to keep the thing afloat with VAT bills creeping up, but he managed it,’ Gallagher says.
‘As often happens in sport as in life, people don’t realise that they are in their heyday when they are in the middle of it because you are up against it and battling the odds. And that’s what happened with Jordan. But it was a special time.’
With VAT bills creeping up, Eddie was under pressure to keep it afloat