“An Independent Man – the Autobiography” (Eddie Jordan, 2007)

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Eddie Jordan is Marmite personified.

To some he’s F1’s much-missed wheeler-dealer cheeky chappy – but plenty of others remember him as a whingeing upstart whose team might have been more successful ahd he run a tighter ship.

This being an autobiography it will doubtless provide plenty of fodder for both sides to support their points of view.

I wonder if the person tasked with creating the cover for this mistook the identity of Eddie Jordan for that of the ‘glamour model’ Katie Price, a.k.a. Jordan, with whom his team were briefly associated.

It’s got that glamorous look the Jordan team always had that wouldn’t work on, say, Ken Tyrrell’s biography.

Mercifully it’s a much better read than Price’s 2006 autobiography “A Whole New World”.

At around 400 pages it’s a comprehensive work that Jordan has obviously approached with an enthusiasm that stayed with him until the end.

It must have been excruciating to mentally re-visit certain periods of his teams history – from losing Michael Schumacher to the grinding inevitability of the team’s collapse in the early 00s. But Jordan’s account is comprehensive and even on the most controversial points tallies fairly well with competing versions of the same scandals.

There are several passages that really cry out for a bit more explanation. In place of that there are a lot of anecdotes that aren’t as amusing as they are assumed to be – except for the one about Bernie Ecclestone on a bus demanding he pay a pensioner’s fare.

Also a few peculiar editing decisions spoil the flow of the text. The chapters are very short and one chapter on 1991 appears to have had a paragraph from the 2001 section copied and pasted across with little thought to the appropriateness of the context.

But I was surprised and pleased to see a book come out from a former team owner so soon after leaving F1 because it shines a light onto some of the less well-known areas of the sport. I’d very much like to see Alain Prost and several others do the same.

2007
Orion Books
9780752875347

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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3 comments on ““An Independent Man – the Autobiography” (Eddie Jordan, 2007)”

  1. I’m in the process of reading An Independent Man at the moment. I’m very much enjoying it – it’s exactly the sort of style I’d expected him to write, and the nature of his career pretty much guaranteed it was going to be interesting.

    Thank you for warning me about the lost paragraph in the 1991 section – I haven’t reached that point yet (I’m still in the mid-80s part) and I am the sort of person who gets very annoyed at editing errors like that.

  2. You may feel that it (the 1991 thing) works within the context when you read it – but I found it jarring.

  3. Having now finished “An Independent Man”, I have to agree with you – the last paragraph of Chapter 20 simply does not belong in that particular place. A sub-editor who was more sympathetic to the flow of the narrative would have been a big help. However, that was the only significant weakness in a book that was highly enjoyable and accurately reflected the Jordan roller-coaster.

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