Eddie Jordan will this week begin negotiations with Heinz-Harald Frentzen in a bid to keep the German driver at Jordan next year.

Frentzen, who almost singlehandedly took the team to its best ever championship finish last year, with third in the constructors' championship and third for himself in the drivers' title, comes to the end of a two-year contract with Jordan at the end of this season and has been linked with a move to Jaguar to partner Eddie Irvine in place of Johnny Herbert who is expected to leave Formula One after the season finale in Malaysia in October.

Jordan though are desperate to retain Frentzen who is the team's most successful driver ever and yesterday Jordan said intensive talks with the driver's management team would begin later this week.

"The engine was the key," said Jordan, referring to last week's announcement that the team will next year be supplied with works Honda powerplants. "I asked Heinz to wait a couple of weeks until I had certain things sorted out, which we announced on Thursday. Up until then I couldn't tell anybody because of confidentiality clauses in the agreement. Heinz now understands what's going on.

"I've spoken to his management over the weekend, and we'll sit down this week and see what the requirements are on both sides and we'll take it to its natural conclusion - whatever that is."

Jordan will certainly have to come close to matching the rumoured £6 million-plus a year on offer from Jaguar, but with Jordan now freed from his £15 million-a-year customer engine deal with Mugen Honda, finding the resources to keep up with the sought after German's wage demands is made easier.

Jordan also admitted that now he has the time and space to consider how best to replace technical director Mike Gascoyne, who revealed in April he will leave Jordan to join the Renault-acquired Benetton team midway through next season. However, Jordan said he remains unconvinced of the need to recruit from outside the team and admitted there are no outside candidates that immediately impress him.

"In terms of a technical director, we have some outstanding people inside the operation," he said. "So much so that a lot of the time I look at how it works and think I've got such good people inside, why do I need to bother looking outside?

"It's the same group of people who developed last s year's car, this year's car and they work well," he said. "Mike has been very good in overseeing these people, guiding them and allowing them to blossom. But I have other people who I believe can do that. So I don't think at the moment there is this great urgency to go out and headhunt somebody from another team."

While the negotiations with Frentzen and the hunt for a new technical director progress, however, Jordan have to still rescue this season from the doldrums. At the mid point of the season the team has only scored 11 points, the last of those scored at Magny Cours on Sunday when Jarno Trulli took sixth and a solitary point. Jordan, however, denied the 2000 season now becomes a period of consolidation in the run-up to the receipt of Honda engines next year.

"Quite the opposite. It's s vital that we go into next season as far up the pitlane as possible," he said. "We were third last year, fourth the year before. The target has to be third again this year. We'd have liked the season to have been better so far but it's a result of seeing the emergence of the real power of Ferrari and McLaren and that kind of power is unattainable at the moment and the next best option is third.

"If we can achieve that it'll repeat where we were last year and it will give us a good platform to kick off in a very strong way next season. It's not the end of the world if it doesn't happen, but right now the pride in the team and the willingness and the wanting to be top three is so strong that there's no thought of sitting back."