By Alan Baldwin
LONDON (Reuters) – Eddie Jordan was nicknamed ‘Flash’ as a boy and the Irishman brought a blast of ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ to Formula One in the 1990s as a flamboyant team owner shaking up the motor racing establishment.
The charismatic boss, who died of cancer on Thursday at the age of 76, will always be the man whose fledgling, cash-strapped team gave future great Michael Schumacher his grand prix debut in 1991.
He will also go down in history as the newcomer in a “Piranha Club” world who had to stand and watch as the German was strong-armed away to Benetton, where he then won two of his seven titles.
Behind the fast-talking wheeler-dealer, a boss who enlisted glamour models to generate tabloid newspaper coverage at a time when tobacco sponsorship paid the bills, was also a man with serious ambition.
Often cynical about the business of motor racing, describing his cars as “high-speed billboards” to entice sponsors, he was a character whose loveable rogue image won fans even if some saw a different side.
A man who might wear a large and very fake designer watch to a court hearing questioning his integrity, Jordan was also a natural pundit — offering titbits of gossip and inside information with some notable scoops.
He knew when to crank up the noise, reporters often on the receiving end of broadsides peppered with expletives in the manner of a man spoiling for a Dublin street fight.
Jordan played drums in a four-piece band, ‘Eddie and the Robbers’ — a jokey reference to his perennial efforts to raise sponsorship and funds to keep the team afloat — and wore a wig from boyhood after his hair fell out.
“He was an honest, trustworthy guy. Somebody that I would trust with anything I’ve got,” former F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, something of a kindred spirit, told Reuters on Thursday.
“There’s nobody in Formula One today that’s like Eddie.
“He was a guy that would help anyone that he could help. He had a bloody good sense of humour. He was always ready for a game and a joke.
“I wouldn’t have called him Flash,” added the 94-year-old Briton who once ruled the sport and assisted Jordan financially on more than one occasion.
“I’d say he didn’t have any limits.
“He said what he wanted to say, did what he wanted to do and didn’t worry too much about what people thought. So he was an extrovert.”
Jordan claimed to have been dealing all his life, starting with school books and then selling time-expired packets of smoked salmon and carpet off-cuts to help finance his early racing.
Schumacher’s arrival on the scene was a business opportunity, Jordan needing a driver and some money after Belgian Bertrand Gachot was jailed for spraying a London cab driver with CS gas.
Schumacher, then racing sportscars, had money from Mercedes and was looking for someone prepared to take a punt on a relative unknown.
His immediate impact at the 1991 Belgian Grand Prix made him an instant hot property and led to Ecclestone spiriting him away before he could sign a longer-term contract with the newcomers on the block.
“I think when I stole Schumacher from him to put him in Benetton… the bottom line was he didn’t want to lose Schumacher, obviously, because he knew he was good,” said Ecclestone.
“But he was more or less thinking about how can he get a few quid out of this?”
Jordan sold his team in 2005, netting a tidy sum after the team had lurched into difficulties, and it now competes as Aston Martin.
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Toby Davis)
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