One of Eddie Jordan’s earliest jobs – before he became a Formula 1 team principal, racing driver, manager or broadcaster – was selling out-of-date salmon to rugby fans as they made their way home from a nearby stadium.
His entrepreneurial instinct served him well as he achieved a feat few have managed in recent decades and perhaps never will again: founding an independent, race-winning Formula 1 team.
Born in Dublin in 1948, Jordan showed talent as a racing driver, competing against the likes of his future driver Andrea de Cesaris and future F1 world champion Nigel Mansell in Formula 3. He won the Irish Formula Atlantic title in 1978.
He decided to make the move into team management partly through realising his limitations as a driver and partly as a series of incidents alerted him to the dangers of racing. His brakes failed heading into the hairpin at Mallory Park in 1975, the car smashed into the bank on the outside and Jordan suffered compound leg fractures. In 1981, after passing the scene of Jean-Louis Lafosse’s fatal crash at Le Mans, Jordan threw up.
He founded Eddie Jordan Racing in 1980, and three years later gained widespread attention when his driver Martin Brundle fought Ayrton Senna for the British Formula 3 title to the final round. Senna prevailed, but Jordan’s team continued its ascent through the junior tiers. The same year he also set up Eddie Jordan Management and began promoting the careers of upcoming drivers.
EJR expanded into the new Formula 3000 championship (which replaced Formula 2) in 1985. After taking Johnny Herbert to the 1987 British F3 title in a Reynard chassis, the trio moved into F3000 together the following year. Herbert gave Reynard a victory on their debut at Jerez, carrying Camel logos. Jordan had applied these to the car in exchange for what proved to be a lucrative meeting with the tobacco brand, which became the team’s title sponsor.
Herbert’s progression to F1 was delayed by his terrible crash at Brands Hatch. Jordan successfully propelled other drivers to the top flight including Jean Alesi and Martin Donnelly. But he also harboured ambitions of entering his own team.
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Jordan Grand Prix arrived on the F1 grid in 1991. Gary Anderson designed a neat chassis with superb aerodynamic performance in high-speed corners, powered by a customer Ford HB engine. Finished in a patriotic Irish racing green – with which Jordan successfully lured 7Up and Fujifilm as sponsors – the 191 is regarded by many as one of F1’s most attractive cars.
De Cesaris was running second, a few seconds behind leader Senna, when his engine expired three laps from home at Spa. But even that was overshadowed by the spectacular performance of his junior team mate Michael Schumacher, whom Jordan had signed up as a replacement for the incarcerated Bertrand Gachot. He put his car seventh on the grid, seven-tenths of a second ahead of his experienced team mate.
But this time Jordan’s business acumen was not up to the standard of the competition: Flavio Briatore lured Schumacher to his team. “Welcome to the Piranha Club,” McLaren team principal Ron Dennis told Jordan at the next round in Monza, where Schumacher was now wearing Benetton overalls. Despite that blow, Jordan finished a stunning fifth in their first season, ahead of established names such as Tyrrell, Lotus and Brabham.
A lean year followed as the team struggled with uncompetitive and unreliable Yamaha V12s. A move to Brian Hart’s customer engines the following year improved matters, as did the arrival of talented newcomer Rubens Barrichello. He gave the team its first podium finish at TI Aida that year as Jordan moved back up to fifth in the points. Jordan picked up McLaren’s Peugeot engine supply the following year and the team scored a double podium finish in Canada, but slipped to sixth. Nonetheless, it was now an established force in the midfield.
Brundle returned to his former team in 1996 but was shaded by Barrichello. Jordan had now brought Benson and Hedges, another tobacco brand, on board as a title sponsor, which paid for the use of a wind tunnel and other new testing hardware at their Silverstone base. They were fifth that year and again in 1997 with an all-new driver line-up – Schumacher’s younger brother Ralf and Giancarlo Fisichella, who was robbed of a strong second place in Hockenheim by a puncture.
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Benson and Hedges pressed hard for Jordan to sign world champion Damon Hill for the following year. He did, and though the relationship between driver and team was sometimes strained, Hill nonetheless delivered the team’s first victory, in a one-two with Schumacher at Spa. He retired from F1 after one more season, however.
Now powered by customer Mugen-Honda engines, these were Jordan’s greatest days. Schumacher’s replacement, Heinz-Harald Frentzen, emerged as a shock title contender in 1999, only dropping out of contention at the penultimate round, having won twice. But at the turn of the millennium car manufacturers were pouring money into F1, and Jordan increasingly found itself outgunned.
Third in the 1999 championship proved its peak. Its 2000 car proved unreliable and it sank to sixth. Although it out-scored fellow Honda users BAR over the next two seasons, the Japanese manufacturer chose their rivals as their exclusive partner, and Jordan returned to using customer Ford engines in 2003.
Fisichella gave the team itw final moment of glory in 2003, albeit in bizarre circumstances. McLaren’s Kimi Raikkonen was originally declared the winner of the Brazilian Grand Prix when it was halted by Fernando Alonso’s huge crash. However the FIA subsequently confirmed it had applied its rules incorrectly, and Fisichella was subsequently confirmed the winner. It was Jordan’s final triumph: By 2005 he had sold his team to the Midland Group. It now races as Aston Martin and its original factory was demolished in 2023 to make way for that team’s state-of-the-art new facilities.
Jordan’s life after his team continued to revolve around motor racing. He joined the BBC as part of its F1 coverage team and demonstrated the value of his contacts when he reported Lewis Hamilton’s move to Mercedes weeks before it was confirmed in 2012. Jordan later revealed he served as an intermediary between Mercedes consultant Niki Lauda and Hamilton when the team courted him.
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Soon after stepping away from his team, Jordan began working with Cancer and Leukaemia in Childhood (CLIC, now known as Young Lives vs Cancer), organising events which raised millions of pounds. However in December 2024 he disclosed his own cancer diagnosis.
Jordan passed away in Cape Town, South Africa on March 20th, 2025, 11 days before his 77th birthday. His family confirmed he had been “battling with an aggressive form of prostate cancer for the past 12 months.”
He is survived by his wife, Maria, and their children Miki, Zoe, Zak and Kyle.
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