
Eddie Jordan has revealed which driver he regrets parting ways with during his time as a team boss in Formula 1.
During his 14 years as a team boss in Formula 1, Eddie Jordan became well-known for being an incubator of young talent, but also for his ability to be completely ruthless in replacing drivers if he needed to.
Eddie Jordan: I made a mistake firing Heinz-Harald Frentzen
Offering refuge to German driver Heinz-Harald Frentzen after tough 1997 and ’98 seasons at Williams, Jordan was immediately rewarded for his confidence in getting the best out of Frentzen as he won two races with the 199 to become a dark horse for the championship.
Frentzen’s outside shot at the title fell apart when his car went into an anti-stall mode following a pit-stop while leading at the Nurburgring, and he eventually finished third overall behind World Champion Mika Hakkinen and runner-up Eddie Irvine.
In contrast, the 2000 season proved disastrous as an occasionally fast but regularly unreliable EJ10 only netted the team 17 points – 11 of which were Frentzen’s.
The following season was worse still but, this time, teammate Jarno Trulli fared better than Frentzen and proved there was a little more performance in the EJ11 than what Frentzen was showing.
Ahead of the German Grand Prix, Jordan sacked Frentzen – infamously, through a fax – who promptly took legal action against his former team boss.
Years later, Jordan would explain that Honda, Jordan’s engine supplier, had wanted Frentzen out in order to free up the seat for Takuma Sato – the Japanese driver made his debut with the team in 2002. Honda supplied both BAR and Jordan, but had made it clear it was interested in scaling back to one team for 2002 – further increasing the pressure on Jordan to comply.
“My biggest, where everybody wanted to kill me, was when Heinz-Harald Frentzen was near enough up in the top three of the world championship, and I had to sack him,” Jordan said on the Formula For Success podcast when speaking about having to axe drivers.
Last week, PlanetF1.com brought you the story of Jordan’s now-repaired feud with Bertrand Gachot in 1991 following Gachot’s assault on a London taxi driver, but Jordan revealed Frentzen’s axing had weighed on his mind the most.
“That was torment, because that was the wrong decision for Honda. They shouldn’t have done that, in my opinion,” he said.
“Frentzen for me, if people were to look at drivers who have not got the full recognition that they needed, the talent that they had, the speed that they had, the overall brilliance in a team – yes, a little bit finicky, but God, he was so quick, so quick, and so good.
“I made a big mistake there. I should have had bigger balls and I should not have sacked him.
“But, in hindsight, that’s the way it works.”
Jordan’s recent comments echo what he revealed in 2005, in which he said he had “loved Frentzen”.
“He won more grands prix for Jordan than anyone else. But I had to protect the engine situation – that was absolutely crucial,” he said.
“I took it on the chin. Nobody except myself and one or two in Jordan realised why I had to do what I did. I was in a position I hated. I wanted to keep Frentzen but I couldn’t.”
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Heinz-Harald Frentzen: ‘No explanation’ for what happened in 2001
But while Jordan would later reveal the pressure he was under from Honda to make room for Sato, Frentzen was left clueless as to what he’d done wrong.
Having entered 2001 under a cloud with Jordan after a promise to keep Sam Michael as his race engineer went unheeded, Frentzen told the Beyond the Grid podcast that, after a decent race at the season-opener in 2001 with what felt like a competitive car, the rest of the season left him mystified as to where the performance went.
“Something must have happened after that day in Melbourne. I don’t know what happened,” he said.
“But since then, nothing was the same anymore. We arrived in Malaysia and, from then, I was really struggling. I don’t know what happened. Everything was different.
“I have no explanation. All of a sudden, it was like somebody pulling the plug. I had no more high moments.
“I was struggling to beat Jarno, he was starting to get regularly faster than me.
“I managed to be stronger in some races than him, because Jarno was a guy… he was really quick, but he also did like to have the best qualifying settings and he was very motivated to get the car for qualifying. But I did take more care about race distance performance. I was running generally a softer diff, for example.
“I was generally running the car more for endurance. So that’s where Jarno caught up, in qualifying at least.
“But something was not running around anymore. And then that famous day after Magny-Cours, where Eddie then sacked me.”
Asked what Jordan had told him at the time, Frentzen said he never fully comprehended the reasons for his sacking.
“It was really no reason. It just, out of the blue, came up with a letter from a lawyer and informed me. So that was a big shock,” he said.
“But it was a little bit anticipated because he was getting strange every time, more strange each race, before Magny-Cours. I didn’t understand the world. I mean, I have no explanation.
“I don’t know what Eddie would have to say that. But I listened to him, some of his comments about that, but I never understood what he really meant.”
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