Motor Sport Brazilian Grand Prix Eddie Jordan has spent most of this week reminiscing. Poring over 12 years of Formula One battles and delighting in surviving against the odds, in beating the laws of probability that said in 1991 his fledgling outfit would be a mere footnote in the sport's history by season's end while wallowing in points scored against the run of play, in victories sealed when merely finishing would have been good enough.

As Jordan approaches its 200th grand prix tomorrow in Brazil, the team principal has been all about misty-eyed views of past glories. The three race wins, the third place in the 1990 constructors' and drivers' championships, the two pole positions, the two world champions - Damon Hill and Michael Schumacher - who raced for the team.

The contrast between those heady days, where every finish achieved, every point scored, was greeted as a triumph of will, and 2003-model Jordan has never been more stark. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just coming full circle.

Jordan-Ford 2003 is a repeat marriage of Ford-powered Jordan of 1991. The sanction for use of the Ford blue oval may this time round have a more official ring to it, but the tone is similar. The team's Phoenix 1991 debut was a tale of a tiny vessel desperately trying to stay afloat with the pumps powered by a customer engine and manned by a crew determined to ship no more water. Almost 2000 races on and Jordan are in that same boat once again.

Two races into a crucial season, Jordan have yet to show they are capable of preventing shipwreck. Few were in doubt that the season would be one of perennial struggle as Jordan slipped away from the lead flotilla of Ferrari, McLaren and Williams and into waters patrolled by disaster-prone Jaguar and the minnows of Minardi, but there had been hope that the tidy and compact EJ13-chassis allied to Cosworth's 72-degree angled V10 could cause a few surprises.

They haven't materialised and coming to Brazil it was a predictable enough tale of opportunities missed and mishaps encountered.

Rookie pilot Ralph Firman departed the Australian Grand Prix within seven laps of the start, inexplicably crashing out when the back end of the car stepped out unexpectedly. Giancarlo Fisichella, the team's one true prize asset, brought his car home, but disappointingly in 12th place.

Two weeks later and it was Fisichella's turn for mishap, the Italian suffering a repeat of the starting-grid brain-fade that had two years earlier seen him missing his grid spot in Malaysia when driving for Benetton. His launch control failed on the start this time and he was sidelined.

It was left to the rookie to uphold Jordan honour and he did so, although the Anglo-Irish driver could do no better than 10th when he was hampered by a mismanaged pit stop that left him under-fuelled for his final race stint and left him running lean and down on power.

The storm has been gathering about Jordan since the salad days of Heinz-Harald Frentzen's championship challenge of 1999 and as the team geared up in Sao Paulo yesterday under a sky bruised with thunderclouds, the impression remained of a team battling against unkind tides and under unfriendly skies. The impression wasn't dimmed by yesterday's pre-qualifying session.

In the morning, as rain tipped down onto the Interlagos circuit, Jordan's Bridgestone tyres looked to be inferior to their Michelin rivals. Fisichella was a brave ninth in the morning session; he was surrounded by a convoy of Michelin runners and backed up by likely contenders such as Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso, who had chosen not to run.

Firman, meanwhile, was 16th, his morning test having been upset by a launch control failure that denied him consistent running, leaving him to learn Interlagos's tricky anti-clockwise layout in diabolical wet.

The portents for the afternoon were not good. Even less so when it was briefly rumoured that the drivers were less than keen to undertake qualifying if the conditions deteriorated further.

They didn't and Firman and Fisichella took to the track as scheduled - 13th and 16th in the track order respectively. It might have been an order that favoured them as the session started and a racing line was etched out by Rubens Barrichello, who finished the day second, but by the time team-mate Michael Schumacher took the track, sixth in the order, the rain had begun to pour again, ending any thoughts of a drying track later in the session. Schumacher however, still stunned with a fifth-fastest time, behind the McLarens of Kimi Raikkonen and David Coulthard, achieved in the midst of the deluge.

In the end Jordan couldn't even benefit from a drying track at the tale of the hour, when Jaguar's Mark Webber claimed an unlikely top-of-the-timesheet berth. Jordan, in the midst of the wettest period of the hour, were left with Fisichella in 11th, some three and half seconds adrift of Webber, and with Firman a further second and a half back in 18th.

But while the initial events of this grand prix were not quite the fairytale some may have hoped for, the true story will not be known until tomorrow. Yesterday was not about campaign tactics but about establishing the parameters of the conflict. For the real battle of grid-qualifying today, and the race tomorrow, uncertainty still holds sway as a volatile weather picture combines with the variable of fuel loads and tyre choice with which the teams will arm themselves for combat.

But unpredictability has been a constant ally to Jordan in the past. The threat of rain for qualifying, a grid upset, a wet race, a brave strategy and the very real possibility that the true colours of the EJ13 have yet to be revealed, give hope, the prospect that the storm will be endured and kinder climes will heave into view.

Twelve years into a long and complicated voyage and the forecast remains the same.