Alastair Macqueen

Racing with Eddie

Recollections of a fruitful few years in the 1980s

In 1981, I started working with Eddie Jordan. We had been neighbours at Silverstone for a couple of years in some of the very first workshop rental units there. I’d been looking after the Brazilian Ribeiro brothers and he had his F3 car there.

Eddie had decided he’d probably be a better wheeler dealer and team manager than a driver, after only modest success in F3. So, we teamed up to form Eddie Jordan Racing. Despite the court jester external persona, Eddie is seriously shrewd and clever. How else do you become head of securities at the Bank of Ireland in your 20s, run a successful F1 team and escape the ‘shark pool’ with millions in the bank?

What Eddie knew most about, given his background, was how to borrow money. In fact, during the Eddie Jordan Racing era he actually ‘owned’ the Northampton branch of the Allied Irish Bank. They daren’t pull the plug on his borrowing or the branch would go down. It therefore came as no surprise to me to hear the branch manager became financial director of Jordan F1 in 1990.

Show me the money

In ’81, we ran Formula Ford and an F3 car for whoever had some money, or whoever Eddie could find money for.

By ’82, we were established enough to compete in a whole season of F3 with James Weaver and a pair of FFs as well. Eddie sorted a deal with Yokohama that we would get free tyres and some travel costs to represent the tyre manufacturer in European round races. We managed to win each of the rounds we entered.

With James driving and the ridiculously sticky tyres, we had a winning and, better still in Eddie’s eyes, a paying combination. The car sat under the podium at Nogaro after winning the race and, when the Champagne stopped flowing, it took five of us to push the car away as it lifted the tarmac stuck to the tyres. The Yokohama tyres were that sticky.

It wasn’t an easy time, though, and we had to wait until Yokohama agreed to pay for the next race before we could move on to Jarama in Spain. We won that one, too.

Eddie was always on the look out for quick drivers, and one guy who was blitzing the field in FF2000 was a certain Senna da Silva. He was invited to come and try our F3 car at Silverstone.

James had put the car on pole the weekend before, so Ayrton knew he was testing a quick car, and I was the first person to strap Senna in an F3 car. He was using James’ seat and we used a couple of sheets of carpet underlay to give him a comfortable (temporary!) driving position.

On his very first run in an F3 car, Ayrton equalled James’ pole time within 15 minutes, and then proceeded to tell us what he needed to go quicker still. He said the aero was great, but we needed to find more mechanical front grip in the slower turns.

I still have the lap sheets from that day.

The following year, Senna became the opposition as he had chosen to take his Brazilian backing to WSR as they had already been British F3 champions three times.

Eddie agreed to run the talented but underfunded Martin Brundle instead. Martin had a season of F3 and a couple of wins behind him, but had lost his BP backing to the guy who had got closest to Senna in their first FF2000 year, Calvin Fish, now a very well-known motorsport commentator in the US.

Martin and Eddie set about finding some money to allow us to compete, and Martin was given a few thousand by his mentor, Tom Walkinshaw, in the form of a GPA helmet deal, for which Tom was the importer.

Eddie didn’t like the idea of going to meet Tom so, as the race engineer (!), I was dispatched to pick up a cheque from Kidlington. That was my first ever meeting with Tom in his office and I was handed a nice, large cheque. As is turned out, it would not be my last.

F3 qualifying results, 1983. Macqueen would go on to work with 11 of the drivers listed here over the next few years

Learning curve

The first nine races of 1983 were painful. At each one we were beaten into second place by Senna, but Martin and I were learning more about the car and each other all the time. Then came the combined British and European round in June at Silverstone where we both decided to forgo British points and go for overall victory on European tyres. This was the turning point of the season. We had the advantage of knowing the tyres from the previous year and Martin grabbed the opportunity with both hands. He took pole and won the race, while Ayrton crashed trying to keep up. That form would be repeated over the next few races until we actually led the championship on points going into the final round. That last round saw Ayrton win and grab the championship, but it’s a complete book’s worth of information as to why. In fact, they’ve made a great film of that season, which is worth a look if you are interested in the whole story. Or you can watch Senna vs Brundle online here: https://vimeo. com/ondemand/svsb

I did another two years with Eddie, by which time he was running three teams: F3000, British F3 and European F3. I was engineering for both F3 and 3000 and finding that with ‘pay’ drivers it was difficult to deliver the results I craved.

I’d been made a director of EJ Management by then, which was just beginning to take off, but eventually I was persuaded to join TWR Jaguar by Martin Brundle.