The passing of Eddie Jordan, who died at the age of 76 on Thursday morning following a battle with cancer, is a major loss for Formula One.
The sport now exists in an era where, thanks to Netflix’s Drive to Survive docuseries and the recent boom of interest, the team principals are far more than leaders of their respective outfits. They’re the figureheads and faces of their teams, often coming from engineering or big business backgrounds.
Jordan’s route included accountancy and bar work, scraping together all the money he could to fund his own racing ambitions — he won the Irish Formula Atlantic in 1978 — before ultimately moving into team management, starting out in junior categories like Formula Three and working his way up the ladder, forming his eponymous F1 team.
Edmund Patrick Jordan was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1948. He always did things differently, selling fruit at school for a profit, then carpets and cars as a young man to help him race after becoming hooked on the sport in the 1970s when karting.
The Irish entrepreneur, a father of four who married his wife Marie in 1979, was larger than life, never shying away from a deal, and brought a sense of fun to the sport that stretched far beyond his involvement in F1 as a team owner.
The sport was a very different…
