When Jordan almost did the impossible and won the F1 title

In many ways, Eddie Jordan was the last of the successful independent team owners to enter F1, doing so in 1991. 

The iconic Jordan 191 and its 7UP livery was the car in which a certain Michael Schumacher was handed his debut at the Belgian Grand Prix.

Jordan GP delivered respectable results over the next few seasons, including a first podium for Rubens Barrichello at the 1994 Pacific GP. 

By 1997, it had risen to fifth in the constructors' championship, behind only the might of Williams, Ferrari, Benetton and McLaren, but that elusive first grand prix victory still eluded the man popularly known as 'EJ'.

That would come one miserable afternoon deep in the Belgian forest at the drenched 1998 Belgian Grand Prix.

Perhaps best remembered for the first-lap pile-up that took out most of the field and Schumacher ramming David Coulthard, it was both the best and worst race of his time as a team owner.

As a result of the collision between Coulthard and Schumacher, Jordan found himself with his two drivers, Damon Hill and Ralf Schumacher, leading one-two and closing in on victory, when 1996 champion Hill elected to pull rank. 

"I'm going to put something to you here, and I think you better listen to this," Hill commanded.

"If we race, if we two race, we could end up with nothing, so it is up to Eddie. If we don't race each other, we've got an opportunity to get first and second." It was a decision Jordan did not want to make, but eventually he gave the instruction, that Schumacher, through gritted teeth, obeyed.

By 1999, Schumacher joined Williams, and the driver who replaced Hill at Williams, Heinz-Harald Frentzen, launched an unlikely Jordan title bid.

Jordan's 1999 title bid

The 1999 season was a strange one in that Michael Schumacher was out of the running after breaking his leg at Silverstone and world champion Mika Hakkinen made a couple of catastrophic mistakes from the lead - crashing out at both Imola and Monza. 

Ferrari's replacement number one, Eddie Irvine, was not quite up to Schumacher's level, and so with the two behemoths struggling, it opened the door for a third runner. 

The Jordan 199 was a sensible, well-packaged machine that was fundamentally a good racing car, and with Frentzen having a point to prove after being booted from Williams, it all came together. Nearly.

He banked second on debut in Australia, following it up with third in Brazil next time out, before scooping two wins in France and Italy after Hakkinen spun out, and two further podiums. 

It meant that after the Italian GP, with three rounds remaining, Hakkinen and Irvine had 60 points apiece, with Frentzen on 50, but with all the momentum as the circus headed to the Nurburgring for the European GP. Frentzen netted a comfortable pole and led for the first 32 laps. 

It was as good as it ever got. 

Coming in for a pit stop, Frentzen failed to disengage the anti-stall system on the car after pulling away from the box, with engineer Sam Michael also forgetting to tell him to "cancel" the system as the protocol called for. 

The car promptly stopped, dashing the dreams of Jordan of winning the world championship.

The kicker was that at the time of Frentzen's blunder - publicly declared an "electrical issue" to save his blushes - both Hakkinen and Irvine were outside of the points, meaning 10 points for a Frentzen win would have seen a three-way tie with the McLaren and Ferrari drivers heading to the penultimate round in Malaysia.

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The Jordan demise

This was Jordan's Icarus moment in F1. His team had flown too close to the sun and so began a downward trend. 

It was not helped by the manufacturer boom of the early 2000s, with giants such as BMW and Toyota entering the series as the likes of McLaren and Ferrari took a strangehold. 

Even Williams, the most successful team of the 1990s, became a bit-part player. 

In this eco-system, a small privateer team could not thrive, although Jordan Grand Prix made it to the middle of the decade, even picking up another win in the accident-shortened 2003 Brazilian GP for Giancarlo Fisichella.

By 2005, Jordan had sold up to a Russian businessman, who renamed the team Midland for 2006, meaning after 250 starts, the 2005 Chinese GP was the last to feature the Irish tricolour on the grid. 

That 'team' would suffer something of an identity crisis in the coming years as Midland turned to Spyker turned to Force India. 

Eventually, Vijay Mallya would bring some much-needed stability, until 2018 when the team was put into administration by driver Sergio Perez, to actually save it. It was re-born as Racing Point, but that was only a placeholder.

But in the end, as he so often did, Jordan would get the last laugh. 

He served as Adrian Newey's manager as the technical wizard looked for a new home after quitting Red Bull. 

Newey agreed to join Aston Martin as a managing technical partner, starting earlier this month. 

If you trace Aston Martin back up its F1 family tree, where do you get to? Jordan Grand Prix! A quite remarkable tale.