Go do some research and don’t be coming here with your hands hanging
Here, knock yourself out with this.
Though, I’d say it’s AI generated it explains a bit about people dying close together. 120 hours, so it’s tight enough.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
It’ll depend on the wills.
Eddie Jordan
Didn’t know that he was ill. I was glued to his F1 team when it was in existence. Everything about it was Irish at the time. Plucky and brash in equal measure. With a tonne of foreign money ploughed in for good measure. Before it inevitably hit a wall in the mid naughtiness. I completely lost interest in the sport when he sold up. In hindsight, four Grand Prix wins was some going.
RIP.
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An Irish legend. RIP.
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Looked shook for a while. A smart man with plenty of balls and little fear. He spotted an opening and went for it. I’d say there was plenty of times he hadn’t a penny in his pocket but a fuckload of bravado and promises. Good on him. He went out and did it. Plenty will talk about doing it. He did it. In an industry where the doors were more often closed to the likes of him.
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It’s not everybody gets a bird named after them.
From what I read, he worked in a bank? I suppose that would have made it easier for him to raise money to buy a team back in his early days?
A bad time for Middle East Arabs. First the genocide of the Palestinians and now the end of Jordan.
They’ll be crying salty tears into the Dead Sea tonight.
Big fan of Coventry City was Eddie. R.I.P.
Times obituary
It was a week before the 1991 Belgian Grand Prix and Eddie Jordan suddenly needed a new driver. Bertrand Gachot, the talented Luxembourg-born racer for Jordan’s eponymous Formula One team, had been handed a prison sentence for spraying a London taxi driver with CS gas during a road rage incident at Hyde Park Corner.
Desperately casting around for a replacement, Jordan settled with some reluctance on a young German from the World Sportscar Championship. Michael Schumacher came highly recommended by those who knew him well but Jordan had previously scouted him and doubted whether he would amount to much.
“I instantly realised there was something special about [Ayrton] Senna. I did not have that feeling with Schumacher. He was what you might call a normal driver — very good, but nothing exceptional,” he recalled.
• F1 legend dies aged 76 after battle with cancer
The main attractions for Jordan were that Schumacher was available at short notice and that the perennially cash-strapped team, which was staying at a £5-a-night holiday camp near the Spa circuit, would receive £150,000 per race from the Mercedes driver’s backers. Jordan called his right-hand man, Ian Phillips, and told him about the new signing. “Michael who?” came the response.
Everyone knew Schumacher’s name after the qualifying session: he was seventh-quickest in his F1 debut in a competitive but not elite-level car. Jordan was stunned by the performance and impressed by the 22-year-old’s “very calm” personality. “He didn’t say much but neither did he miss much,” he observed. Schumacher surged to fifth place at the start of the race itself only to retire on the first lap when his clutch fell apart.
Jordan with his wife Marie at Royal Ascot in 2013
ALAMY
The future seven-time champion then sent a terse fax to Jordan that read, “Dear Eddie, I’m very sorry but I am not going to be able to drive for your team,” and joined Benetton. Jordan believed Schumacher had agreed a multi-year deal but it transpired that the wording in a letter of intent had been changed from stating that Schumacher would sign “the driver agreement” to “a driver agreement”. Rather than admit that he had consented to drive for Jordan, Schumacher’s camp insisted that he agreed merely to visit their factory twice a year.
It was a tough early lesson in the ruthlessness of F1 for Jordan. Rarely outmanoeuvered, the entrepreneurial Irishman now understood why the McLaren boss Ron Dennis had greeted him to the competition by saying, “Welcome to the Piranha Club.”
Jordan suspected that the then-F1 commercial rights controller, Bernie Ecclestone, had encouraged Schumacher’s switch to a more established team that would have superior engines in 1992 to maximise his impact in the important German market. Divide and rule, Jordan contended in his 2008 autobiography, An Independent Man, was a core Ecclestone strategy as he exerted his Godfather-esque control over the sport.
Jordan respected Ecclestone for his wiles and felt the admiration was was mutual because he was willing to stand up to the billionaire, who liked tough and determined characters as long as he did not perceive them as a threat. “I was never afraid to be critical, or to tell him ‘Bernie, you are the biggest bastard I have ever met’,” Jordan wrote, adding, “If anything appeared to be going too smoothly, he would throw a spanner in the works because he survived on aggravation.”
Not that much was straightforward for Jordan as he sought to establish his Silverstone-based but Irish-registered team in F1. The sport was becoming more expensive and increasingly reliant on corporate largesse and cutting-edge equipment from leading manufacturers, making it harder for small teams to compete.
Jordan during the Italian Grand Prix in 1991
PASCAL RONDEAU/ALLSPORT/GETTY IMAGES
To sign gifted drivers who could not afford to buy their seat in the car, Jordan founded a management company and paid his charges a salary of about 10 per cent of the sponsorship money they brought to the team. “My thoughts were usually focused on the financial gamble rather than the hazards associated with driving quickly,” he said. “I would let the drivers take care of what they knew best and I would concentrate on what I knew best — doing the deals.”
Still, the team burnt through £10 million in 1991. The Jordan 191 car was handsome — painted green in a deal with the Irish tourist board — and quick but this first year was dogged by mechanical failures despite the relative success of finishing fifth in the constructors’ championship, with fourth-place finishes in Canada and Mexico for the erratic Italian, Andrea de Cesaris. Heavily in debt, they faced a winding-up petition for failing to pay £1 million to the engine-maker, Cosworth.
Jordan had sealed a big sponsorship deal with 7Up because the soft drink was popular in Ireland, but the brand’s parent company, Pepsi, pulled out to spend its marketing budget on Michael Jackson. At least there was a contract with Fujifilm, sealed after Jordan flew to Japan and showed company executives a model car with an unrealistically large tail fin so their logo would seem huge.
As a team owner, he had to use all his business savvy to stay competitive
AURELIA BAILLY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
The ever-resourceful Jordan found a way to stay afloat, as he would for years to come, though an attempt to sign Senna by offering him 49 per cent of the team did not come to fruition. In 1993 Jordan installed a Northern Irishman, Eddie Irvine, behind the wheel. He finished sixth in his first Grand Prix at Suzuka. This achievement was overshadowed when Senna, the winner, marched into the Jordan trailer, called Irvine a “f***ing idiot” and threw a punch at him for a perceived transgression during the race.
Irvine was soon reputed as the sport’s biggest playboy since James Hunt. This was not necessarily a negative for Jordan as he sought to establish his team as a cult underdog brand. “Leave the winning to McLaren and Ferrari and Williams,” someone advised him.
When Benson & Hedges wanted a snake logo on the yellow Jordan cars in 1997 (changing their name to Bitten & Hisses to skirt bans on tobacco advertising), the owner reluctantly obliged. Jordan employed “grid-girl” models, including Katie Price and Melinda Messenger, to drape themselves over the vehicles. The punk singer-songwriter John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, became a friend and something of a team groupie and George Harrison hung out in the Jordan motorhome.
With the “grid girls” Leah Newman and Michelle Clack
GETTY
Jordan took the former Beatle, the Genesis co-founder Mike Rutherford, Ecclestone, Piers Brosnan and Helena Christensen to a performance of Riverdance in London. “I was surprised to see that she was fiddling with her mobile phone during the performance. I thought she must be bored,” Jordan said of the supermodel. “It was only later that I discovered Helena had called her flat in Paris and recorded the show on her telephone answer machine just in case there was no DVD available.”
While F1 was as glamorous as advertised, Jordan’s team indeed left the winning to others as reliability problems persisted. A cost-cutting move to Yamaha engines in 1992 backfired as the team scored a solitary point. The next year was only slightly better with Hart engines, though the Brazilian driver Rubens Barrichello showed potential. Unable to afford substantial improvements to the cars, Jordan nonetheless informed drivers that the vehicles had been souped-up, hoping to boost their pace through psychology rather than technology.
With Irvine on board for a full season, 1994 was a breakthrough. Barrichello finished third at the Pacific Grand Prix in Japan, a first podium for Jordan at the 50th attempt. The team ended fifth in the constructors’ championship. Teaming up with Peugeot after a deal struck over red wine and foie gras at the company’s Paris office, Jordan finished sixth in the standings in 1995.
The owner then brokered a deal in effect to sell Irvine to Ferrari, where he would partner Schumacher, and replaced him with the British veteran, Martin Brundle, for 1996. Though dogged by frequent race retirements, and rarely threatening to finish on the podium, Jordan was at least the best of the middling outfits.
Jordan and Pierce Brosnan were awarded honorary doctorates by the Dublin Institute of Technology in 2003
CHRIS DOYLE/NEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS LTD
A first victory was secured at the 127th attempt in 1998 when Damon Hill, in a Mugen-Honda, won the Belgian Grand Prix. His team-mate, Ralf Schumacher — Michael’s younger brother — was second. The win came as such a surprise that the race organisers did not have the Irish national anthem available to play at the podium ceremony.
Schumacher departed for Williams — Jordan felt Michael engineered the move — so Hill, the Londoner who had won the title with Williams in 1996, was joined by Heinz-Harald Frentzen in 1999. The German outpaced his team-mate, winning in France and Italy, and Hill quit after a season that brought nine retirements in 16 races. Jordan finished third in the constructors’ championship with a team-record 61 points, though this was less than half the tallies of the top two, Ferrari and McLaren.
It proved the high point. Jordan sacked Frentzen during the 2001 season amid differences of opinion and in a desire to appease Honda by signing a Japanese driver, Takuma Sato, for 2002. Results declined and the team came second-last in the constructors’ standings from 2003 to 2005, though the Italian, Giancarlo Fisichella, did win the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix in a Ford.
Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Jordan celebrating a win
MICHEL EULER/AP
Jordan was called in to a meeting with Ecclestone, who warned that the team was heading for collapse. The thrill had gone for Jordan; the team had ballooned to 250 staff and he hated not knowing all their names and having to delegate, while the need for tight operational structures did not suit his breezy style. “I never saw myself as a manager. I was more of a seat-of-the-pants operator,” he said.
The owner, who had sold 49.9 per cent of the team to a private equity firm in 1998, parted with his remaining majority stake for a reported £16 million in 2005, selling to a Russian-born Canadian entrepreneur, Alex Shnaider. The team was renamed Midland Racing for 2006 and unveiled in Red Square as Ecclestone eyed Russian expansion.
Edmund Patrick Jordan was born in Dublin in 1948. His father, Paddy, was a quiet and devout Catholic who worked for the electricity board, and his mother, Eileen, was a housewife. By his own admission he was “a chancer in many respects”. His entrepreneurial streak was evident from a young age, as he bought and sold everything from marbles to school textbooks. Mildly dyslexic, he excelled at mathematics and reflected: “That is probably one of the reasons why wheeling and dealing came so easily.”
Giving Michael Schumacher a quick pep talk at Spa in 1991
SUTTON IMAGES
Abandoning dental college, he joined what became the Bank of Ireland. During a strike in 1970 he worked as an accountant for an electricity company in Jersey. Trying go-karting on the island one Sunday, he found it exhilarating. Returning to Ireland, and posted by the bank to the small town of Mullingar, he established a karting club. Safety provisions were basic, with only straw bales to protect racers from collisions with lampposts. One day his left leg was shattered in a crash with a one-armed karter who decided to go the wrong way round the track because he was bored. Two broken ankles followed in later accidents.
To finance his hobby, Jordan sold carpets at a roadside market and flogged smoked salmon of questionable freshness to Dubliners from a stall on Grafton St. He also sold cars as a middle man; stopped for speeding, he avoided a ticket by promising the officer a terrific deal on a used vehicle. He carried what he called a “dodgy press card” in his wallet in case it was ever useful to pose as a reporter.
Jordan went rallying in a Vauxhall Viva and took part in the Formula Ford championship in the mid-Seventies, graduating to Formula 3, though his brakes locked entering a hairpin at Mallory Park and the resulting crash broke his legs. He won the 1978 Irish Formula Atlantic title and moved to a village near the Silverstone track. Jordan drove a BMW M1 in the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1981. This came about thanks to an offer from an acquaintance, the Pink Floyd drummer and motorsport enthusiast, Nick Mason, who had previously taken part but was unavailable that year because the band were performing. Jordan was himself a drummer in a band, Eddie and the Robbers.
Realising he was not good enough for F1 he decided to focus on management, starting Eddie Jordan Racing in 1980 and competing in Formula 3 and Formula 3000, a series created in 1985 as a bridge to F1. He hired Brundle and offered a test drive to a young Senna, who preferred to sign for a more prestigious team. When Senna and Brundle were locked in a tight battle for the 1983 British Formula 3 championship, Jordan tried to disrupt the Brazilian’s practice routine by pretending they were spying on him. He signed the future F1 driver Johnny Herbert, who won the series in 1987.
At a disco Jordan met Marie McCarthy, an Ireland under-21 basketball player and trainee computer programmer. They married in 1979 and had four children: Miki worked in sports event management, Zoe became a banker then a fashion designer, Zak a snowboard competitor and teacher, and Kyle co-founder of a sustainable cleaning products company.
BRYAN MEADE FOR THE TIMES
After selling the team, Jordan moved from Oxford to Surrey, the better to pursue his passion for golf. He owned a house that backed on to the Wentworth course and rented it to Tiger Woods during the 2006 World Match Play championship. Jordan caddied for his friend, the Irish golfer Paul McGinley, at a tournament in Munich in 2005.
He had numerous and varied business interests, including stakes in Celtic FC, Debrett’s and gaming companies, and was a dedicated supporter of the charity for children with cancer and leukaemia formerly known as Clic. He mentored young people with car-crime histories for a 2006 reality television programme, Eddie Jordan’s Bad Boy Racers — From Chequered Past to Chequered Flag. In 2014 he took delivery of a new 155ft “super yacht” said to have cost £32 million.
Reliably colourful, he worked as a F1 television pundit, though lamented the lack of a serious challenger to the Dutch Red Bull driver, Max Verstappen, who won his third successive title in 2023. “I’m bored stiff, to be honest,” he said.
Eddie Jordan, Formula One team owner and businessman, was born on March 30, 1948. He died of cancer on March 20, 2025, aged 76
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Always worth remembering that Eddie was the reason DHL changed their business colours.
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I wonder will they give the Irish jig a separate burial.
What a moment that must have been for him
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I paid some attention to Formula 1 during the Jordan era but I’d no recollection of the team actually winning races. Eddie Jordan seemed like an alright enough sort but I’d like @Fagan_ODowd to comment.
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