The worst F1 car to win a grand prix?

When I returned to Jordan in 2002 as head of race and test engineering after a year in America working for Reynard, there were a lot of things that weren't right.

Eghbal Hamidy was technical director and some strange decisions were made on the car that we had to fix, such as the fact that the front of the chassis was too narrow to be legal and the wishbones didn't comply.

Eghbal's argument was that 'they never checked these things', but mine was that the car must be fully compliant. He left during the season and Henri Durand replaced him; since his time at McLaren he had worked for the Prost team, which didn't make it to the 2002 grid.

We also switched from Honda to Cosworth engines for 2003, and once Henri had got his feet under the table he decided we should switch our car-development direction based on the philosophy he would have taken with the '02 Prost. He suggested that way we could have a car that could challenge for the world championship!

So we tried his ideas in the windtunnel, and ended up with 10-15% less downforce than what was being worked on already. This took away about three months of development time, and you can imagine how pissed off this made the mechanical and aerodynamic design teams. But he was confident we would end up better off than we were originally, and we ended up with a mixture of Henri's ideas and what we were already working on.

The Jordan EJ13 was a car with limited potential and given that we had one shot at building a competitive car, as we lacked the resources to develop it, it was largely a case of getting the best out of it at the track.

There were things about it that just didn't make sense, and they didn't respond to developments. As I have said many times, start the season with a pig's ear and you end the season with a pig's ear, and that's what we did in 2003.

We qualified eighth with Giancarlo Fisichella in Brazil for round three. That was at the time when you ran in Saturday qualifying with the fuel on board that you started the race with. We were obviously on fairly low fuel and, if the race was dry, we would be stopping by about lap 10.

When I saw it was going to be wet on Sunday, I went to see [race director] Charlie Whiting and asked him if we could adjust the front rideheight because the conditions were dangerous. He agreed.

Then, either he changed his mind later or no-one else requested a set-up change, because when I told [Ferrari technical director] Ross Brawn, just to wind him up, he was furious.

This next bit sounds too unlikely for the story, but it's true - my dad had died the week before the race and I'm sure from up above he played a big part in the outcome. The night before, I had a dream that we won the race. The question was how could we achieve that?

It came to me that if it was wet and the race started behind the safety car and we pitted after about five laps, we would have enough fuel to take us past lap 54, which was the point where full points would be awarded in the case of a red flag. So I had in mind a strategy built on being as high up as possible at that point.

It poured down and the race started under the safety car. The first point at which we could stop and get to lap 54 was after five laps, so we called Fisi in. He refused because he wanted to go racing when the green flag was thrown, so I had to get on the radio and tell him that he definitely was going to come in, which after some discussion eventually happened after seven laps.

The race got under way a lap later and Fisi and [team-mate] Ralph Firman were running at the back.

Ralph might also have got a good result, and he was behind Fisi at the start of lap 18 when a front wishbone failed. He spun; thankfully Fisi saw him and avoided being collected into Turn 1. And, very usefully, Ralph collected Olivier Panis's Toyota, which had been holding Fisi up!

There was then a nervous time when I had to decide whether or not to keep Fisi in the race with a potential wishbone problem. We checked the life of the components, and Ralph's wishbone was a new part whereas Fisi's wishbones had done over 2000km and been proof tested before the weekend.

I decided to keep him out as the presumption was there was some kind of assembly error on that wishbone - it turned out a mechanical fixing had not been put in place properly.

Fisi drove very well in a chaotic race. As people went off and made their pitstops we kept an eye on them and no-one seemed to stop for long enough to take on a full fuel load, so they were still planning two stops.

On lap 53, he was up to second behind Kimi Raikkonen's McLaren, but a mistake from Raikkonen allowed him to get ahead and cross the line to lead lap 54. When Mark Webber had his big accident and Fernando Alonso's Renault collected one of the wheels from the crashed Jaguar, the race was red flagged.

This is where it became messy. We thought we had won, but the stewards decided to set the countback to lap 53 on the basis that you go back two completed laps. They thought Fisi was still on lap 55 when the red flag came out.

Subsequently, it went to Paris the Friday after the race and it was proved that he had just started lap 56. So the countback went to lap 54, and Fisi won the race, with the trophy presented to him at the next race at Imola in an odd ceremony on the start/finish straight!

It probably is fair to call it the worst car in recent times to win a grand prix, and it seemed that the car even knew it too as it caught fire as Fisi stopped in the pitlane at the end of the race. It was only a small oil fire from a breather pipe that was too close to the exhaust system, but it would have been enough to prevent us restarting.

Although I'm often credited with the design, all I ever did was try to make the best of it because my main job at the factory was to justify and authorise the spend on developments, while Henri and the design team were tasked with coming up with them.

We had many reliability problems early in the year and the lack of development just meant that, as the season progressed, we were on a hiding to nothing and we only managed two more points finishes - a seventh and an eighth place.

Once you've got a car like that, all you can do is make the best of it. And that's exactly what we did at Interlagos.

I reluctantly decided at the French GP that for me enough was enough - Jordan Grand Prix was not the team it once was and was now totally driven by finances, with no vision for future success. I'm the first to recognise that you have to work within your budget, but on the way to that you can duck and dive.

If our commercial team didn't bring in the sponsors, our mechanical budget was reduced but we still had the pressure of trying to get performance from the car. Unfortunately, life doesn't work that way.