On this week #11 – The history of the Jordan Grand Prix
Thirty-three years ago this week, the brand-new Jordan team made its debut in Formula 1, at the season-opening 1991 United States Grand Prix in Phoenix (which, incidentally, would be the last grand prix to be hosted in America until 2000, when the sport returned to Indianapolis).
Jordan's Belgian driver Bertrand Gachot, formerly of Coloni, was classified 10th – although he didn't actually finish the 81-lap race, as his Cosworth V8 engine expired on lap 75. The other car of Andrea de Cesaris, meanwhile, didn't even overcome the hurdle of pre-qualifying: also as a result of engine issues (Gachot, by contrast, qualified a solid 14th and ran as high as seventh in the race).
So it was a relatively inauspicious beginning on March 10, 1991 – but few people could have guessed what it would lead to in just a short space of time.
That very first Jordan 191, designed by Gary Anderson, is thought by many to be one of the most beautiful Formula 1 cars of the modern era, with a particularly evocative 7Up livery, whose dark green reflected the Irish heritage of the team's charismatic owner Eddie Jordan. The Irish identity was very strong, with the team even sponsored by Ireland's tourist board.
‘EJ', as he is known, has still been a familiar face in the paddock in recent years – with an opinion and a conversation on more or less everything. In Ireland, they say he has “the gift of the gab”: in other words, the ability to talk his way into and out of anything. That certainly accounted for a lot of the early success at Jordan Grand Prix, with the team rich in promise but relatively poor in cash flow at the beginning. No problem – EJ would sort out a creative solution. For example, the car was originally going to be called the Jordan 911. But EJ agreed to drop the name after complaints from Porsche – provided that they lent him a road car for 18 months…
After that initial hesitant start in Phoenix, the fledging team went from strength to strength over the rest of the year: de Cesaris would deliver the best results, thanks to two fourth places in 1991, rehabilitating his own reputation as well. The first fourth place was in Canada, only race five of that season, where he was followed home by Gachot in fifth. Jordan had arrived.
They proved that the 191 was a simple, yet effective design: an opinion that had also been voiced from the very start by the veteran John Watson, who carried out the initial testing. But none of them (nor another rookie, Alex Zanardi, who completed the season) were Jordan's most famous driver: that honour fell to Michael Schumacher, who was with the team for precisely one race, in Belgium, before being snapped up by Benetton. But that's another story that we will tell later this year...
After an astonishing debut season, Jordan finished fifth in the 1991 constructors' championship, and the 191 was named as ‘car of the year' at the prestigious end-of-season Autosport Awards.
It was the predecessor to a series of cars that culminated in the 2005 EJ15: the very last Jordan, with the team then sold to the Midland Group: the very first Russian F1 team. It subsequently became Spyker F1 and then Force India – which lives on today as Aston Martin, currently fifth in the constructors' standings after two races this year.
The legacy that Jordan would leave behind – having developed so many promising talents, including names like Jean Alesi, Rubens Barrichello, Eddie Irvine, Ralf Schumacher, and Takuma Sato – cannot be underestimated. Above all, Jordan were plucky giant-killers: in 1999, Heinz-Harald Frentzen came seriously close to winning the drivers' championship with them. All that would have been hard to guess on that overcast day in Phoenix nearly 35 years ago.
In the words of EJ himself: “The only reason I started with Jordan Grand Prix because I was unemployable elsewhere. Back then, we still had the concept of the owner-manager: it was your team, and your money that was at stake. Now, it's so different: all very corporate. At Jordan it was a full-on involvement, but I think we did perform particularly well. And I enjoyed the fact that I didn't have or didn't want to have somebody telling me what to do. And that's just very old fashioned, isn't it? But it was certainly the right way for me.”
In so many ways, the life of Jordan Grand Prix marked the beginning, and then the end, of an era.
