How Jordan laid its foundations in 1990

As 1990 was the season before I came back into Formula 1 with the Jordan team, it's a very interesting year for AUTOSPORT to look back on this week.

The regulations at that time were pretty simple, and in that regard we were lucky in the timing of attempting to move into F1. The turbos had gone at the end of 1988, but there were a range of 3.5-litre engines with different configurations - V8s, V10s, V12 as well as a few more unusual ones - and you could do it on a realistic budget.

Of course, as well as saying we were lucky, you also have to say that Eddie Jordan was absolutely right to come in then, rather than trying it earlier or later because things changed rapidly.

You could still go to the windtunnel and spend a couple of days a month working there and be able to come back with more downforce - although whether or not you could afford to build the new parts was another matter!

The numbers were also decent, so the returns were high because aerodynamics weren't so sophisticated. As the years passed, that became more difficult and the percentage improvement you could find got smaller and smaller, meaning you needed ever-more staff and finance to make progress.

Now, with the bigger budgets it is more complex. I first started as a mechanic in F1 in 1973 and the change from then to today is enormous, which is perhaps not a surprise given it's 42 years.

Aerodynamics were so primitive in 1990 that Tyrrell's raised nose turned heads © LAT

But even looking back to 1990 when we were preparing to come in as Jordan, through to 2004 when I stopped working in F1 full-time, the changes were horrendous.

With all the talk about the future of F1 and plans for a very different type of car in 2017, it's natural to ask what can be learned.

No matter how you look at it, aerodynamics has become the unquestioned prime mover of the formula, in terms of car design. It doesn't matter how you are creating it, it's inevitable that the way the car ahead disturbs the airflow will have an influence on the one following.

Let's say you have a car with no downforce. The lateral g-force the car will generate while cornering is perhaps 1.5g. It's the downforce that allows you to multiply that and have forces of 4g.

But as soon as you've got these high cornering forces that we have today - basically because of the high levels of downforce from aero - you'll be affected by the car in front.

It's tough to take away aerodynamic influence and it's not easy to make people forget things, but what 1990 shows us is that you can have cars that can follow each other if you can take something away from the aerodynamics, and put more onto the tyre to make up for it.

If you make the mechanical grip and the aerodynamics 50/50 contributors in terms of chassis performance, you are onto a good thing.

Jordan fielded Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Eddie Irvine in F3000 in 1990 © LAT

A sound mechanical package was essential for the success of the Jordan 191, which I was working on through most of 1990.

In 1989, I was working at Reynard on the F3000 car. I originally went there because I wanted to see if I could hold my head up in the drawing-office environment, because although I'd designed and made my own cars before, it isn't the same and I had not been involved in that kind of organisation. And I had no formal education, just learning things because I was interested and got involved.

It was difficult because I wasn't a production-car kind of bloke. I didn't like having to use the wishbone bracket that there were 200 of in the store - I wanted to use something that was correct and worked best.

But I'd designed the 1990 F3000 Reynard and wasn't enjoying it when Eddie called up late in '89 and asked me to join him working on the F1 car. I said no because I was planning to go back to engineering in F3000 as I enjoyed that.

Eventually, a combination of Eddie and my wife Jennie persuaded me! The story in AUTOSPORT at the start of February said I was close to joining the EuroBrun team as race engineer for Roberto Moreno, who I'd run to the F3000 championship in 1988, but it wasn't really that close.

If I got a job for every discussion like that I'd had, I would be extremely busy! But I did pay them a visit in Switzerland and still have a very nice vase that they gave me as a present for my wife - after all, I did go to visit them on her birthday.

So I started work with Eddie in February 1990. He'd told me there was a drawing office ready to go, but when I got up there, there was absolutely nothing. The team's base was in an industrial unit at Silverstone opposite Alan Docking Racing.

New Sauber recruit Mark Smith and Force India's Andy Green joined Jordan early © LAT

The office upstairs was Eddie's and behind that there was a mezzanine floor that had to be converted into a drawing office.

I told Eddie that if he thought I could do it on my own, he was wrong. So I said I had a couple of people at Reynard that I worked well with, and that I'd like them to join me.

They were Andrew Green and Mark Smith, now technical directors at Force India and Sauber respectively. They started a month after me because I spent the first weeks working on the building and on the phone getting all the catalogues for the off-the-shelf bits and pieces you need to design and build a car.

I ordered three drawing boards, a layout board, a few pencils, a rule, a tape measure and a lot of rubbers, and in March we started to put together a car concept.

At that point, I didn't seriously think it would go anywhere. I thought it would be a design study and maybe we would build a car in the end, but even in those days you needed significant money to race in F1.

We decided Andrew was going to do all of the suspension, the steering and driveline. Mark did the gearbox and they met up between them for the engine installation. I did the chassis composites and set up a one-third-scale windtunnel programme at the University of Southampton.

I was living in Staffordshire at that time, in Kings Bromley, and had a drawing board at home, so I spent my weekend drawing windtunnel bits and pieces, after a week of drawing full-car bits and pieces.

We had to produce windtunnel models and Paul Thompson, who is still with Force India, worked on that. There was also a 16-year-old named Darren Turner working with us on that - then a young karter, today of Aston Martin Racing fame!

Anderson doubted Jordan would make it to Phoenix's 1991 season opener in March © LAT

It was a very different time in terms of windtunnel testing. We used to measure the vortices generated with a piece of wool on a bit of wire that we'd shove through a hole in the windtunnel door. But it was the only way we knew - and it worked.

That's when things really got started. We had a concept and I was clear in what I wanted - a car that was easy to understand, easy to set up, gave the driver good feedback and was consistent. And we achieved that.

As the windtunnel model progressed, we then needed to press the button on full car parts. So we did deals with outside suppliers like the composites company to build the chassis.

At that time, we were building the car around a Judd engine, but one day Andrew and I were coming back from the composites shop over in Huntingdon; we stopped off at a pub in Silverstone, saw this guy sitting there and asked if we could sit beside him. We had a chat and told him we were doing this project with Eddie Jordan.

"What engine are you going to use?" he asked. And I told him the Judd.

He gave me his card, which said 'Bernard Ferguson, Cosworth', and told me to get Eddie to give him a ring. That was the start of how we got the Cosworth engine.

But still I didn't think it would happen. Every month Eddie and I would talk about where things were, then one day at the beginning of November he walked in and said: "Right, we're going for it."

Anderson, here checking data with Jordan at Phoenix, knew a simple car was vital © LAT

We had a car almost built, but it was still month-to-month. Thanks to a bit of money from 7UP and some other contributions, we got the green light.

At that point, I thought "shit..."

But we had made a lot of progress and had passed most of the FIA crash tests, except the rollover bar test, so I had to come up with something for that.

The first test with other F1 teams was at Paul Ricard in January 1991, but we ran at Silverstone at the start of December with John Watson driving, before going to Pembrey with Andrea de Cesaris, who we signed to drive along with Bertrand Gachot.

It was nice to have John in the car because he's Irish. We had talked in the middle of the year and he was very forthright, asking - as only John would - who did we think we were building an F1 car to take on the might of McLaren! He thought it wasn't possible.

I said that, from my point of view, it was possible and I told him all the stuff about the aim to make it driver-friendly. We knew we needed that because we'd have to pre-qualify, so you needed a car the driver could jump into and get on it immediately.

When he drove it, he said it was confidence-inspiring. The rear was stable under braking and it was exactly what he liked in terms of car balance. By that he meant it had a lazy front-end, which was the one thing we could never get rid of. It didn't have loads of understeer or anything, but it just meant the rear was very secure.

The first public drawing of what would become the Jordan 191 © AUTOSPORT

We did have a problem with the front-left wheelbearing at that first test but otherwise it went well. We'd used F3000 loadings but hadn't adapted it enough to cope with the grippier F1 Goodyear tyres, so we had to redesign the front uprights.

We did 20 to 30 laps, but couldn't run all day. Then, a few months later, there were were in Phoenix for the first race.

One of the keys to success was not paying too much attention to what everybody else was doing. I have never understood why people try to put a design from another car on their own without understanding what it does. It's fine to check it out, but if you don't understand the objective then you will not make full use of it.

I always tried to work on the basis of only putting parts on the car that we knew worked and that we understood. So the concept was set early on.

We released a drawing of the car in late April 1990 and it's not too far away from the final car we ended up producing, when you take into account how little work we had done on it.

While a big team can pursue many different directions, a small outfit can only go one way. But if it chooses the right one and puts all its efforts into that, you can do as good a job as a big team. OK, you won't keep up the same momentum in the long term, but you'll have a good package to start the season with. That's the road we went down.

And it worked pretty well, as we were scoring points and finished behind only McLaren, Williams, Ferrari and Benetton in the 1991 constructors' championship.

This week's special issue of AUTOSPORT magazine, out on Thursday, will look back on the 1990 Formula 1 season, including interviews with Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell