Eddie Jordan remembers his F1 team’s last win: 'It was total carnage'

Then, as so often was the case in Jordan history, an opportunity presented itself.

Just three races into the 2003 season, and yet again the team had already experienced all the highs and lows that come with life in F1: almost foundering on the rocks of financial disaster, then winning a grand prix.

“That was a very tough year,” Jordan remembers. “We were really suffering because it was coming to the end of the Benson and Hedges era, the end of tobacco for us.

“I realised that without a very major corporate sponsor, things were very difficult.

“Ken Tyrrell was no longer there, Frank Williams was not as strong as he used to be.”

Jordan had suffered the double blow of losing title sponsors DHL, then engine supplier Honda deciding to move its works operation over to BAR for 2003 – leaving the Silverstone team using customer Cosworth units.

“The price Ford made us pay for the engines were astronomical, so clearly I wasn’t overjoyed with them,” he says.

“I could see the writing on the wall that it was going to be really difficult to survive.”

Jordan had salvaged sixth in the constructors’ championship in 2002, but the lack of funds and an underdeveloped car in the EJ13 meant that it started again on the back foot in 2003.

The little team was not without serious talent though – technical director Gary Anderson rejoined in 2002, Rob Smedley, who would shortly move to Ferrari, was Fisichella’s race engineer and the car’s aerodynamics had been shaped by Henri Dumand, fundamental in designing the sleek McLaren MP4/8 in which Ayrton Senna took five wins in his final year at Woking.

Car issues caused Fisichella to retire from both races while Firman spun out at Melbourne on his debut and came in 10th out of 13 finishers in Malaysia, a lap down.

At the third round of the season in Brazil, Fisichella had done well to put himself eighth on the grid – F1’s new rules for that season meant he’d score his first point of the season if he finished in that position. But Smedley, Anderson, and Jordan wanted more.

Prior to race, set to be run in torrential rain, Smedley had suggested to his superiors the idea of pitting early to fuel to the end and fitting new intermediate Bridgestone tyres that should outlast their Michelin-shod rivals. Jordan says the team’s knowledge of the race officials’ inclinations meant the plan was worth a gamble.

“Knowing [race director] Charlie Whiting as we did, he would do everything he could to get the race to three-quarters distance [and therefore award full points] – he was dead against half points,” says Jordan.

“So we reckoned we’d put fuel in at a stop to get us to at least 75% of the distance.”

The race started with rain hammering down, and ran under the safety car for the first eight laps.

As Smedley told Motor Sport in 2020, he spent that period trying to persuade Fisichella to buy into the plan.

“These were the days when you could talk openly on team radio,” he said. “I explained the strategy to Fisi and he said to me, ‘Might be an idea, but we’re not going to do that.’

“Giancarlo was sitting on the fence about it and then said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it because we’re eighth, we can get some points.’

“I had to bring it to the FIA to appeal it,” he says. “At the time, they’d followed protocol and manually moved the results back one lap [to when Räikkönen was in the lead] from what was on the telemetry, but the computers had already done this for them – it was already accounted for in the system. The win was rightfully ours.

“I had to fight with the FIA. Obviously, there was a big rigmarole. [FIA president] Max [Mosley] didn’t want to hear the appeal, but he had to.”

As Jordan now rightly asserts, it was a simple case of human error.

“As we were going into the court, Charlie, said to me, ‘Look, I don’t think we need to go through with this. I think the FIA will accept your claim. And we understand there was a mistake made by the timekeepers’”.

Fast-forward to Imola and McLaren team boss Ron Dennis and Räikkönen handed over the trophy to Jordan and Fisichella, but the latter says he still felt a bit short changed.

“I was a bit annoyed because when we had our first win at Spa in ’98, they didn’t have the Irish national anthem,” he says. “We then didn’t get it in Brazil, and they didn’t play it for us in Imola either.

“I think it would have been really nice for everybody associated with a small team. I felt cheated – it wasn’t our mistake.”

Jordan is therefore lumbered with the statistic of only having had its national anthem played at 50% of its victorious races.

For Fisichella though, one of F1’s nearly men at that point with so many grand prix near-misses, he was finally off the mark with a win – he didn’t get to stand on the top step of the podium but he did get to celebrate the win in his home country.

“Those days were wild, crazy and good fun”

“Coming back to Jordan was a big ask for him and a big risk,” Eddie says. “Fisi had good times and bad times with us. I adored the guy.”

In Jordan’s colourful history through F1’s red-blooded V10 era, Brazil 2003 was its last hurrah, after similarly cute wins at Spa ’98, as well as Magny-Cours and Monza the year after.

“The Fisi thing in Brazil, in my opinion, was a fair amount of luck,” he says. “But we were in a position to take a bit of luck because we’d already pre-planned it as much as we could do.

“What I loved about the team was that we were small, but we all knew what was going on in the race, because we all talked about it beforehand.

“Those days were wild, crazy and good fun.”