'Eddie Jordan brought sunlight to the F1 paddock... and a dose of mischief'

Granted, Jordan never became a dominant force in F1, yet it achieved far more than many better-funded operations ever managed. Four grand prix victories is a record not to be sniffed at, especially for a privately owned team that sometimes operated on a budget that would barely have covered McLaren’s Ron Dennis’s private aviation bills. But what truly distinguished Eddie’s team was its spirit. The F1 paddock was in the 1990s in the process of becoming more corporate, increasingly polished, and occasionally sterile. Eddie blew through all that like a benign hurricane. His motorhome pulsed with music; his mechanics whistled while they worked; and his drivers sometimes even looked as though they were enjoying themselves.

Then there was the branding. When tobacco advertising restrictions forced ingenuity upon F1 teams, Jordan turned subterfuge into an art form. Benson & Hedges might have been the sponsor, but when circumstances required subtlety the logo would morph into mischievous alternatives: Buzzin Hornets, Bitten & Hisses, Be On Edge, and other clever linguistic acrobatics made fans smile and marketers nod in admiration. It was typical Eddie: playful, rebellious, and creative. He knew it annoyed some people, but he did not care. Indeed, he turned that negative into a positive by tattooing his arm with the legend ‘FTB’, which stood for ‘f*** the begrudgers’, a phrase that perfectly summed up his worldview.

Over the years he ran an astonishing roster of drivers in F1. Michael Schumacher made his grand prix debut with Jordan at Spa in 1991. Martin Brundle, Eddie’s old F3 confederate, arrived in 1996. Damon Hill followed in 1998. Along the way Jordans were raced in F1 by Giancarlo Fisichella, Ralf Schumacher, Jarno Trulli, Heinz-Harald Frentzen, and many others.

Every team owner dreams of a perfect day, but few ever experience one. Yet Eddie did, on that damp, chaotic, unforgettable afternoon in the Ardennes in 1998, when Damon and Ralf finished first and second: a Jordan one-two. I was not at Spa that day – more’s the pity – but I can still picture TV images of Eddie gambolling along the pitlane after the race, arms stretched wide, yellow rain jacket open and flapping, grinning and jigging his way down to the podium. He looked almost delirious, as though every risk he had ever taken had suddenly paid off. For a brief moment the F1 paddock seemed to belong entirely to him.

The following season, 1999, was better still — Frentzen won two grands prix and had an outside chance of becoming world champion — but F1 never stands still, and the years that followed became harder, for the sport was growing ever more expensive. Each winter brought the same grinding anxiety: finding enough sponsorship money to fund the next season’s campaign. Those were the years when I got to know Eddie well. Journalists and team owners are not always natural allies, but Eddie enjoyed the craic, so did I, and I loved his company. We began having coffee together at grands prix frequently. Sometimes it would be a quick chat; often it would stretch into a long discussion about the sport, or about the peculiar madness that draws people into F1 in the first place, or sometimes about life and even love. Soon we began to meet in London for dinner. Often Eddie’s wonderful wife Marie would join us — and occasionally, a few years later, my husband Angel would come along, too. Those evenings were full of laughter. Eddie loved telling stories — usually embellished, occasionally outrageous, and always entertaining.

He was also a generous host. More than once I stayed at the Jordans’ home in Oxford, a place that always felt warm and welcoming. Later I visited their villa in Sotogrande, where Eddie seemed particularly happy, wandering around in the sunshine in sarong and bandana and nothing else, talking about boats, music, and racing in roughly equal measure. He was never afraid of looking slightly ridiculous in pursuit of joy. I regard that as a rare and admirable quality.

Eventually, the financial pressures of F1 became too relentless even for his boundless energy. In 2005 he sold his team to the Midland Group for $60 million (about £33 million in those days). Via various name changes – Midland, Spyker, Force India, Racing Point – it has now morphed into Aston Martin.

Now a wealthy man, Eddie embraced life with characteristic gusto. He sold the houses in Oxford (to Gil de Ferran) and Sotogrande, and he established new homes in London, Monaco, and Cape Town. He reinvented himself as a television pundit and later, alongside David Coulthard, as a podcaster – roles for which his increasingly rent-a-quote patter, freed as it now was from the need to appease sponsors or schmooze other F1 bigwigs, seemed almost preordained.

He broke stories. He asked awkward questions. He occasionally infuriated the more buttoned-up elements of the sport’s hierarchy. In 2015, when I was McLaren’s comms and PR chief and Eddie was a pundit for the BBC, he suggested on live TV that, so poor was the then Honda-powered McLaren team’s performance, Ron Dennis should step down as chairman. Ron was apoplectic and, live on Sky Sports F1 TV, he retaliated thus: “I consider F1 a family; some families live in villages; most villages have an idiot, a village idiot; and Eddie fits the bill perfectly.” I spoke to Eddie afterwards, and he was a strange mixture of amused and furious.

Eddie and Ron had a love-hate relationship, but, once you had peeled away the tensions that F1 competition always layers onto the way senior people relate to one another, you could see that there was more love than hate. Here comes another Jordan/Dennis story. In 2007, just before I had joined McLaren, Ron rang me up and said, “Will you be on my team in a charity quiz this evening?” I agreed, and, when I arrived at the venue, which was in Brick Lane, in London’s East End, hardly a Ron Dennis-type locale, I strolled in and encountered not Ron but… Eddie.

“Are you on Ron Dennis’s team?” I asked him.

“No, I’m on [footballer] Dennis Wise’s team,” he replied.

Now, as a bit of essential background, I have to remind you at this point that I am a gay man. Eddie was entirely comfortable with that, he always had been, but he thought that perhaps Ron would not be. Actually, he was wrong about that, because Ron was never remotely homophobic. Anyway, in walked Ron, while I was chatting to Eddie, and with Ron were a group of distinguished-looking chaps in suits, other members of his quiz team as it turned out, and I remember that one of them was Alessandro Agag, long before his most famous innovation, Formula E, had been inaugurated; another was Ray Bellm, the successful GT and sports car racer turned businessman; and the others were four senior C-suite representatives from some of McLaren’s biggest sponsors.

“Now you’re out of order,” said Ron, visibly bristling

So I was a bit of a fish out of water — a journalist among all these rich and successful men — and I was at once impressed and chuffed that Ron had selected me to join his team, and also aware that he obviously wanted them to have fun, certainly, but also to have the kind of fun that he assumed would not spook them. So being greeted by Eddie as soon as they all walked in was not on Ron’s wish-list bingo card; far from it in fact.

Ron began to introduce us all to Eddie — and, once he had finished, Eddie said, “Is your team the gay team, Ron?”

Ron looked horrified, but answer came there none. “Is this the gay team?” Eddie repeated.

“Now you’re out of order,” said Ron, visibly bristling.

“No, I’m not,” Eddie continued. Then, pointing at me, he said, “He’s gay. There’s nothing wrong with it, Ron.”

“I realise there’s nothing wrong with it, Eddie,” Ron continued, reddening, then he ran out of steam. He was literally lost for words.

There was a short silence. Suddenly, Eddie, who was enjoying himself now, turned to one of the four senior C-suite representatives from some of McLaren’s biggest sponsors, and said, “Are you gay?”

“Er, no, no,” the poor man replied.

It is a funny story, but also a revealing one, because it illustrates Eddie’s incorrigible relish for mischief. Yet he was kind as well as puckish. In 2020 my first and so far only novel was published, The Boy Made the Difference (still available via Amazon if you are interested), and I decided that every penny of its proceeds would go to the wonderful charity Young Lives Vs Cancer (then called CLIC Sargent). When Eddie heard about it, he immediately instructed his PA to buy 50 copies. I remember ringing him to thank him, slightly embarrassed by the scale of his generosity. “I won’t read a f***ing word of it, but I’m buying 50 copies because it’s such a good cause,” he replied.

Whenever we met or spoke during his last years, he often sounded happier than ever. He played the drums or the spoons with his band. He travelled. Most important, he spent time with his children and grandchildren, whom he adored. Life was good. Then came illness. Cancer is a word that lands heavily in any conversation, but when it appeared in Eddie’s life it seemed particularly cruel. Here was a man so full of vim that the idea of his being slowed by disease felt almost impossible to accept.

During his final months we exchanged a series of WhatsApp messages. They were nothing grand or dramatic – just brief notes, the sort of friendly check-ins that people who have known each other for a long time send without overthinking. And, despite his worsening condition, Eddie’s messages were normal, funny even. In other words, Eddie remained Eddie: upbeat, irreverent, and chummy.

FTB. F*** the begrudgers. It strikes me now that his motto applied not only to his critics and rivals but also, in a sense, to fate itself, for he had always lived life as though daring the universe to try to stop him. Well, on March 20 last year – almost exactly a year ago, which is why I am writing this column now – the universe finally succeeded.

Within hours tributes were arriving from every corner of the sport – drivers, engineers, mechanics, marshals, journalists, photographers, executives, and of course fans – people who had known Eddie well, people who had encountered him briefly, and people who had never met him at all. The tone was always the same: affection. Why so? Because, for all his flamboyance, and for all his bravado, he never lost a deeply human geniality that people instinctively warmed to. He made you laugh; he made you feel included; and he made the absurd circus of F1 feel, at times, like an eccentric but loving family.

A year has passed now, and F1 folk have moved on, as they always do. New teams rise, new drivers arrive, and new controversies erupt. The sport remains as busy and as relentless as ever. F1 is a strange business. It produces heroes, villains, legends, and footnotes. But every now and then it also produces someone like Eddie Jordan: a unique character who seemed to carry sunlight with him wherever he went. I miss him. I miss him a lot.