Former Formula 1 team owner and TV analyst Eddie Jordan dies

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Eddie Jordan's drivers won four Formula 1 Grand Prix races across 250 starts. (Photo by Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images

Longtime Formula 1 team owner and businessman Eddie Jordan died Thursday. He was 76.

Jordan owned the Jordan Grand Prix team that competed from 1991 through 2005. Over 250 races in that span, Jordan drivers won four races and scored 19 podium finishes and the team provided seven-time champion Michael Schumacher with his first chance in Formula 1.

"We are deeply saddened to hear about the sudden loss of Eddie Jordan," F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali said in a statement.

"With his inexhaustible energy he always knew how to make people smile, remaining genuine and brilliant at all times.

"Eddie has been a protagonist in an era of F1 and he will be deeply missed. In this moment of sorrow, my thoughts and those of the entire Formula 1 family are with his family and loved ones."

The team’s best season came in 1999 when drivers Damon Hill and Heinz-Harald Frentzen scored 61 points together and finished third in the constructors standings. That was the team’s highest constructors standings finish ever.

That season was Hill’s last in F1 after he had joined the team in 1998 and scored the team’s first-ever win. His addition came with controversy, however, as he teamed with Ralf Schumacher that season. Schumacher left the team at the end of the season after he was told not to pass Hill in the waning laps of Hill’s win.

Things went sideways in the 2000s for the team. After switching from Honda to Ford engines in 2003, the team finished ninth in the standings for two seasons with Ford. The American manufacturer — which is returning to Formula 1 in 2026 with Red Bull — put its engine department up for sale after 2004 and Jordan ran Toyota engines in its final season in 2005. That year, Jordan sold the team to the Midland Group, an entity that lasted through the 2006 season.

After he sold his F1 team, Jordan was an analyst for BBC’s coverage of the sport from 2009 through 2015. In his role as a TV pundit, he was the first to reveal that Lewis Hamilton was making the first stunning team switch of his career when he went from McLaren to Mercedes.

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