Profile: Eddie Jordan - Formula One team owner and occasional drummer: The loss of his court battle with Vodafone and his team's recent bad form may be damaging for Eddie Jordan, but it would be a mistake to think that this will lessen his optimism, writes Justin Hynes
On the morning of this year's French Grand Prix in June, Eddie Jordan was a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Embroiled in an unpleasantly revealing £150 million court case with Vodafone, wrestling with the thorny topic of just where his team will source their engines next year and desperately trying to crowbar long-overdue funds from Formula One's power brokers to pay for this year's supply of Ford engines, he muttered wearily about the team's trials and tribulations.
But as the impromptu chat drew to a close, Jordan, shovelling a last spoonful of muesli into that famous motormouth, visibly brightened. "But I'm telling you here and now, there are a couple of big things on the way, honestly, big things."
Whether or not this is true, and one suspects it is not given his team's current perilous state, it is a measure of what Eddie Jordan is like.
Relentlessly positive. Often hopelessly determined. An inveterate gambler. If the earth were opening and the sky raining fire, Jordan would be setting up a bridge building company, selling asbestos umbrellas and betting on who would be swallowed up next. The lure of the upbeat soundbite and the get-rich-quick deal are impossible to resist.
But this is the nature of the business he's in. Formula One is a sport peopled with chancers, ne'er do wells, heroes and villains. And Jordan is all of these things. To survive, as one of the paddock's last remaining independents in a world of multinational motor manufacturers, he has had to be. But the judge in the Vodaphone case labelled him a "wholly unsatisfactory witness".
The career highlights are sketched in misty detail on the team's website. Mid-grid racing driver Jordan progresses from 1971 Irish Kart championship win to Irish Formula Atlantic title and finally to a stint in British Formula Three and Formula Two before gracefully retiring from a career behind the wheel to take up a career in wheeling and dealing.
It was a path eminently more suited to a bank official who has bought and sold cars, carpets and anything he could lay hands on to finance his racing.
The move saw the foundation of Eddie Jordan Racing in 1980. And, surviving on vast reserves of energy, hard graft, a peculiar and often unintelligible gift of the gab and the ability to find resources and rewards while others went to the wall, Jordan took his team from F3 to F3000, where he won the International Formula 3000 title with Frenchman Jean Alesi driving for his team.
Part of the reward for winning the title was the ability to trade Alesi to Formula One team Tyrell, a money-spinning possibility that Jordan would remember and employ several times in his Formula One career.
With the F3000 title secured, the only possible step up was a move to Formula One. In 1991, Jordan Grand Prix débuted at the US Grand Prix in Phoenix, where the team miraculously qualified in an era when almost 40 cars vied for just 27 grid spots.
It was miraculous, too, in that the team was still a shoestring operation run from a small garage at Silverstone. In the team's Phoenix paddock area, Jordan's gracious wife Marie was employed as chief caterer, handing out sandwiches to a handful of officials and well-wishers, including Gary Anderson, designer of the tidy and beautiful Jordan 191 and still a Jordan employee to this day.
But a fifth place in the championship by the end of year one was no reward when the bailiffs came knocking. Several million in debt, Jordan looked like going under. But few had reckoned on Jordan's ability to curry favour with the right people and pull in the favour when most needed.
Jordan called in F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, who bailed the team out and kept Jordan racing. Over the following years, Jordan worked his enthusiasm, optimism and often florid banter to secure life-saving deals with first Sasol and then, most crucially, with Benson & Hedges in 1996.
The wedding of publicity-hungry team owner and the titillation-loving tobacco company was a marriage made in heaven and is a relationship still intact. The ability to maintain relationships with key personnel and sponsors is another of Jordan's quixotic traits. To outsiders, the bantering, back- slapping Jordan can wear thin, apparently leaving little of substance.
But those brought inside the Jordan fold, either as co-conspirators or merely as fonts of funding, are beset with a mysterious loyalty which, though often extending to weary smiles of indulgence, also extends to protectiveness and, apparently, genuine affection.
Not so from those who they think they have been wronged by the team owner, however. Just ask the Schumacher brothers. Michael Schumacher, discovered by Jordan in 1991 and who raced for the team, with electric results, at Spa Francorchamps that year, was dragged through a court battle by Jordan who took umbrage at Benetton/ Renault's Flavio Briatore poaching the nascent star. Jordan lost.
Ralf Schumacher too was irked by Jordan, the Irishman first getting the young German to move over in 1998 to let team leader and former world champion Damon Hill bring home the team's maiden Grand Prix win, and then playing hard to get when the younger Schumacher was quitting Jordan for a move to Williams at the end of that year. Both Schumachers have since had little good to say about the Irishman.
Current driver Giancarlo Fisichella has also felt the sharp edge of Jordan, the Italian being dragged through the courts when Flavio Briatore again turned poacher in 1997. And litigation struck again in 2001, when driver Heinz Harald Frentzen was peremptorily sacked just prior to the German's home race. A law suit followed, Jordan settled the German's outstanding wage claims.
But bizarrely, Jordan rarely bears a grudge in such matters. Eddie Irvine was almost welcomed back to the fold this year. Frentzen almost had a one-off drive with Jordan last year when Fisichella was injured at the French Grand Prix and indeed, the German could yet race again for Jordan next year. Fisichella himself has been welcomed back.
But always at the back of the matey magnanimity is hard-headed business. Irvine was ditched when Ralph Firman came up with the right money for the drive and B&H liked the cut of Firman's Anglo-Irish jib. Frentzen was offered a race last year in a sponsor- satisfying move. Fisichella came back in a swap for Jarno Trulli and at a fraction of the $8 million a year the highly rated Italian was getting at Benetton/Renault.
And it is Jordan's eye for the main chance that has been his undoing in the past week. Aggrieved at having missed out on a £100 million-plus sponsorship deal, Jordan let jealousy and anger get the better of him and, on the strength of a few muttered words from Vodafone's global brand manager, went to court and lost spectacularly.
Branded an unreliable witness, whose recollection of events was as fluid as his sales patter, Jordan's image as Formula One's deal-maker extraordinaire has suffered perhaps irreparable damage.
Minardi boss Paul Stoddart's bitter description of Jordan as "the Arthur Daley of the paddock", after the Irishman failed to back Stoddart's bid to secure money owed to both earlier this year, now has an official stamp of approval.
But it won't sink Jordan's positivism. If such a thing could be said, the ruling came at the ideal time for Jordan. Formula One is currently n the midst of a three-week break, a plan instigated by Jordan two years ago for the benefit of the team, before reconvening in Hungary later this month.
Jordan has the chance to lie low and let the flak fade. And then he will be back, gurning for the camera behind his beloved and somewhat ill-treated drum kit, stiffly thrashing out rock 'n' roll standards behind his hired band V10, hamming it up at a charity golf tournament with old mucker and fellow Celtic shareholder Dermot Desmond and gripping and grinning with any fading rock star who'll agree to an audience. But will anyone in the paddock or companies looking to get in, be paying attention?