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...Ireland as a clerk. When, during a strike in Dublin, he went to work in Jersey, he witnessed kart racing for the first time and upon his return to Dublin, he bought a kart and began racing. In his second year of racing he entered the Irish Kart Championship in 1971 and won it.
Jordan moved on to Formula Ford, where he competed for two years and where he broke both his legs in a crash. He switched to Formula Atlantic, won three races and won the Irish Formula Atlantic Championship in 1978. Jordan and Stefan Johansson raced in British Formula Three in 1979, calling themselves “Team Ireland”.
At the end of 1979 and short of money, Jordan founded his first team, Eddie Jordan Racing, the team finished second to Ayrton Senna in British F3 and in 1987 the team won the British Formula Three Championship with Johnny Herbert driving.
In 1989 the Jordan F3000 team dominated the season and Jordan driver Jean Alesi won the championship. Jordan founded Jordan Grand Prix in. The team quickly gained its respect and punched above their weight on a number of occasions during the season. It should also be noted that Eddie Jordan gave a young German called Michael Schumacher his Formula 1 debut in that, the team’s debut season. After one race for the team, Schumacher was lured away to rivals Benetton.
In 1998 the team achieved its best ever result when drivers Damon Hill and Ralf Schumacher finished first and second at the Belgian Grand Prix. In 1999 Jordan achieved their F1 zenith when Heinz Harald Frentzen became a genuine contender for the championship, ultimately finishing third, the best placing ever of a Jordan driver and accumulating two race wins along the way.
After losing a Honda engine partnership deal to the BAR (now Honda F1) team in 2002 and numerous difficulties within the team, Jordan was forced to switch to expensive Cosworth engines. The burden of this plus DHL withdrawing their sponsorship and Benson and Hedges toning down their sponsorship soon added up and the lack of funds made his team go from bad to worse in 2003. However despite this, Jordan delivered an improbable race win in Brazil 2003 courtesy of Giancarlo Fisichella, the first for Fisichella and the last Formula One victory for the Ford Motor Company and the Jordan team.
His famous charisma had enabled him to “finesse” a number of sponsorship deals, without which Jordan Grand Prix would almost certainly have gone the way of Prost Grand Prix or Arrows. At the end it all proved too much and a buyer was found in Midland Group financed by wealthy Canadian businesman Alex Schnaider. The dream of Eddie Jordan, his pride and joy, the “rock and roll team”, were lost forever to the hard realities of modern Formula 1.
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- Entrepreneurship
- Leadership and Formula 1
- Life on the Edge
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