Executive Golf Magazine

“I’ve nothing against Singapore,” Eddie Jordan says, “but I never want to see that airport again. It feels like, over the years, that was the place I spent most time in.”

It’s not exactly the answer you might expect when you start chatting to the former F1 team boss about what he has and hasn’t missed since he sold up and moved out of motorsport. But that’s to be expected, because if there’s one thing that Eddie Jordan loves above all else, it’s confounding people’s expectations.

Take, for example, the expectations people had of him when he was a young man growing up in Dublin. “In those days, you either followed your family profession or you went into the church,” he says. “I didn’t think there’d be enough wheeling and dealing, conniving and backstabbing to keep me happy in the church, so I followed my dad’s profession. But going by the things you hear about the church these days, I think I’d have made a pretty good Pope!”

So Jordan started training to follow his father into dentistry, but a few months into the course he decided to turn things upside down and go into banking. It lasted a while – and allowed him to sharpen his natural sales skills and business acumen – but a flirtation with go-karting while on secondment in Jersey provided the young Eddie with a new obsession, one which would never let go: motorsport. He returned to Ireland, bought a go-kart and promptly won the Irish karting championship.

From there, Eddie moved over to England and began moving up the ranks as a racing driver. Talented but not exceptional, he saw the competition around for places in Formula One – competition from the likes of Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell – and decided to pursue an alternative avenue to racing success. Jordan’s team, Eddie Jordan Racing, was born in 1979 and started in Formula Ford and worked through the ranks of motor racing, winning championships at every level before ultimately making the move into F1 in 1991. There, over the course of 14 seasons, Jordan’s team became the underdogs that everyone loves to love.

“I regret not starting in motor racing earlier,” he says, “but looking at it now it helped me get into management earlier. I think you can’t really regret, you’ve got to go with your life. It’s not an easy ride, and sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t.”

That philosophical outlook is hard won, and the ups and downs of the sport were hammered home to Jordan half-way through his maiden season at the top level of the sport. He’d signed a deal with a young, up-and-coming driver by the name of Michael Schumacher whose first race in F1 was with Jordan. The young German impressed immediately, but before Jordan knew what was happening his new star had been whipped away from beneath his nose and placed with the more competitive Benetton team after only one race.

“I was naïve,” Jordan says. “I had a contract, and Michael wanted to stay with me I’d given him the chance and he respected that. But you know, we were into big marketing things.

“Looking back I suppose there was no guarantee I was going to survive. Bernie Ecclestone was the one who pushed, more than anyone, to get Michael away from me and into a really top-flight team. I could understand his point of view. When Michael drove for me that day there were 20,000 extra people on the gate because of the German contact – F1 was absolutely devoid of German content, and they needed a German driver. What Bernhard Langer did for golf in Germany, Michael has done for motor racing.”

“I didn’t think there’d be enough wheeling and dealing, conniving and backstabbing to keep me happy in the church, so I followed my dad’s profession”

Today, Jordan is on good terms with Ecclestone - they’re neighbours in Kensington, and go to watch Chelsea together. “Bernie had vision. When everyone else started talking about Dubai and China, Bernie had already been there and signed the contracts.

“F1 is very cut-throat, very tough, it has everyone trying to stuff you. I suppose you could say that about any business, but F1 at that time was, for me, incredibly harsh.”

Such dealings were a tough baptism that led F1 to being christened ‘The Piranha Club’ by Jordan’s rival team boss, Ron Dennis of McLaren.

And while looking for a brief respite from that sort of pressure, golf was always one of Jordan’s favourite pursuits. Growing up in Dublin, he became a respectable six-handicapper and while he hasn’t kept the same standard up through a hectic working life, he’s always enjoyed playing. Drivers such as Damon Hill and David Coulthard were regular playing partners, and Jordan reveals that the best F1 location for golf is in Italy. “Monza,” he grins. “There’s a golf course right in the centre that you can play while the cars are racing round. Quite superb!”

Jordan has an excellent excuse for not having kept his golf up to the standard he attained as a youth: he’s broken his left leg 14 times. “They gave up on the ankle in the end,” he says ruefully. “They just fused it up. It’s fine. I can run on it though I have a slight limp. The one thing that it affects is golf because I’m inclined to quit on the follow-through on a lot of shots if I don’t really concentrate with the result I come up off the ball. I really have to think about it.”

And as if it weren’t a good enough excuse for the odd sliced drive, Jordan also plays the old war injuries card to excuse his slight touch of fair-weather-golfer syndrome. “It has to be warm to help it,” he says. “I have difficulty playing in really cold temperatures.”

“F1 is very cut-throat, very tough, it has everyone trying to stuff you. I suppose you could say that about any business, but F1 at that time was, for me, incredibly harsh”

Just as well, in that case, that Eddie has memberships at Royal Mougins and Sotogrande – that way, he’s got somewhere warm to play while wintering on the Riviera or Costa del Sol. And when he is further north, he has memberships at Portmarnock, The Oxfordshire, Collingtree Park (which he also owns) and Sunningdale where he rates the Old Course as his favourite in the world.

Jordan’s stories of horrific car crashes from the bad old days of motorsport are hair-raising, particularly when he recounts the tale of the year at Le Mans when his team mate Herbie Muller was killed. “It’s awful,” he says. “When you’re about to crash, you just put your head down and say to yourself, ‘F*** I hope this doesn’t hurt…’ And then it always does.

“But nowadays the safety of the cars is phenomenal. The accidents I had wouldn’t happen nowadays. The Kevlar cars offer a lot more protection and the car bounces up. That’s one of the most incredible forward steps that motor racing has ever seen.”

Back at the time Jordan himself made that switch, those safety improvements were still a long way off. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how such an effortlessly charismatic person as Jordan realised he could make it in the sport without being behind the wheel. Though losing Schumacher in his first year was a blow, it did no harm to the Jordan team’s prospects. After all, what better advertisement could there be for a team owner’s scouting ability? Charming sponsors for years to keep themselves going against all the odds, the Jordan team established itself in F1 and became the only privately-run team to have more than one Grand Prix victory to its name.

In 1999, they came agonisingly close to winning the championship with Heinz-Harald Frentzen behind the wheel. It would have been the ultimate underdog success and confounding of expectations in the sport, but Frentzen crashed out while leading the penultimate race and left the dream unfulfilled. “We had some great moments, but what means the most to me now when I look back was keeping the team alive when we really had very little chance of doing so,” he says. “And it’ll mean more to me as the years go on. The suppliers, the shareholders and the staff were all looked after and that was important to me.”

That belief in the personal touch seems very genuine, and despite the hard business decisions Jordan had to make in his time he evidently feels hugely proud of the family spirit he fostered in the sport, both in and outside his team. “If you go into the Honda team truck, you know Mr Honda isn’t going to be there,” he smiles. “With the name Jordan over the door it’s very different. That’s why private teams could do so much better than their finances. Just by being there and showing that you care, and that you’ve got the hunger and determination to be successful, often filtrates through to the people who work there.”

The one thing that tarnishes Jordan’s career, as he sees it, was never winning the championship. “It’s a big regret, but it’s softened in some way because it’s now impossible. The Ferrari and Michael domination was fantastic, and unless you’re a major manufacturer I think it’s unrealistic or at least unreasonable to expect to win a race or championship.”

But was F1 damaged by Ferrari and Schumacher being so far ahead of the pack for so long? “Probably in some respects, but that’s unfair on Michael because he was just that good. To me, he rates as one of the all-time greats in sport, alongside Pele, Jack Nicklaus and Lance Armstrong.”

Jordan is equally philosophical about selling his team in 2005 after reaching the decision that there’s no place left in F1 for private teams: he equates it to being a corner shop trying to compete with Tesco.

“Things move on,” he says. “I had an amazing time. Am I bitter? Not in the slightest. I’m overjoyed at the pleasure I’ve been able to have out of it, and hopefully the pleasure that Jordan brought to a lot of people, because we were a very popular team.”

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