Jordan ready for the hard road

Eddie Jordan yesterday said sacking key personnel last week and the swingeing cuts he will make at his team this season were fundamental to the survival of the troubled Irish team and that he had no regrets over the decision. Justin Hynes reports from Barcelona

Responding to a question as to whether Jordan's economic difficulties were a salutary lesson for the rest of the teams in Formula One's financially tight paddock, Jordan said he believed his team's difficulty was not an isolated problem.

"Jordan's set of circumstances may be totally different to others. I suspect it's not though," he said. "We're talking about a balance between performance and what funding is available to them, because there is a balance that has to be there.

"Teams like mine, which is run purely as an entrepreneurial team, we can only spend the money we get in. You can't go to the bank each year and ask for more and more money because it dries up very quickly. Then there's no point being a bankrupt hero. That's not my style and not the way I've been brought up from a managerial point of view.

"People can call me a tough old boot if they like, but if it means Jordan stays in business to fight another day and to get back to the respectable position that we were in in '98 and '99, fighting to races and championships, then that's fine," he added.

"Those wins and that fighting chance are so desirable. And at the moment I don't take any pleasure out of what's happening at Jordan."

The Jordan boss admitted the choice had been hard, but he had the imprimatur of the Jordan board.

"It was enormously painful, but the trade-off was that I had thought about it for a considerable amount of time and felt there needed to be changes, so mentally I had come to the realisation that these things had to happen, it needed to be done immediately.

"I had spoken on and off to the key people and I think they understood where I was coming from. When the board meeting was called last week, it was endorsed, we had all thought about it in the past and it was endorsed as: 'Eddie, do what you need to do to bring the team back, to get back the fighting spirit and the charisma that it once had'."

The Jordan boss went on to admit that the team had over-extended itself in the wake of its glory days in 1999, when it finished third in the constructors' championship and third in the drivers' championship with Heinz Harald Frentzen, who won at Magny Cours and Monza.

"Probably we were a victim of certain successes," he said. "That is, we won a number of races. It's not that we got cocky, it's just that money seemed to become available and this is one of those occasions when I think that money may have been the biggest enemy.

"You keep raising your levels of expectation, the job, who you employ. Suddenly it got out of hand in terms that it was no longer able to have a hands-on situation and, a) I missed that, and b) I hope that I'm right in making these cuts because it needed to be done from a fiscal reason but also from a performance point of view."

The team boss, who will reduce his workforce from over 250 to close to 200, just a third of Ferrari's, by the end of the season, also claimed that the involvement of motor manufacturers in the sport had brought increased financial pressure on so-called "privateer" teams like Jordan, Sauber, Arrows and Minardi.

"I think it's got more difficult," he said. "I think manufacturers are fantastic for being in the sport, supporting us and bringing us to a new level, but they sure as hell made it a lot tougher for us because they're high-quality people and they know what they want and they're able to acquire what they want and need and the budgets are . . . well, it would be so easy for me to say the budgets they have are so much bigger and use that as a continual excuse, but that's nonsense. It may have a very small relationship to do with the overall package.

"But you still have to have a good group of people, you still have to have a bloody good design of car, you have to put the very best package together of driver and performance, and clearly there's been something missing at Jordan for the last year or so."

It is something that continues to be absent at the team. On a day when Ferrari maintained their dominance, with Michael Schumacher setting the day's fastest time, Jordan's pilots, Giancarlo Fisichella and Takuma Sato finished the day eighth and 14th respectively. Fisichella, though, felt that the day's work had been successful.

"Today was not bad at all and I think we look alright compared with the competition," said the Italian.

"The problem was that the grip levels are very low - it's quite different on the track than during winter testing and the car oversteers much more in these warmer conditions.

"But we're going in the right direction on set-up and I think we can improve by at least three-tenths for qualifying, as we have a few things more for the engine and chassis."

Those three-tenths would have boosted the Italian to seventh, but only if the EJ12's reliability can be guaranteed. Yesterday, Sato suffered another embarrassment, pulling his car off track within yards of the pit lane exit just 28 seconds into the first free practice session.

The only immediate bonus for Jordan could be that Barcelona, like Imola, is being tipped as a Bridgestone-friendly circuit. Yesterday, only Jenson Button and Jarno Trulli of Renault and Kimi Raikkonen of McLaren claimed top-10 spots for Michelin.