The Jordan-Ford EJ13 has a credible case to be one of the worst Formula 1 cars ever to win a Grand Prix. It would be a colossal understatement to suggest that its shock victory courtesy of Giancarlo Fisichella at the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix came against the run of play during a season in which it proved slower than all bar Minardi by a metric of supertimes.
Taking the chaotic, prematurely concluded Interlagos race out of the equation, Fisichella only outscored rookie team-mate Ralph Firman by a metric of 2-1 by finishing seventh at Indianapolis. Firman’s only point with the car that habitually brought up the tail end of the midfield behind Jaguar (usually qualifying better in Mark Webber’s hands than it raced), Toyota, BAR and Sauber came with eighth in Barcelona.
Perhaps unfairly, his year is best remembered for the rear wing failure during practice at the Hungaroring that resulted in a 150mph impact with the barriers and left Firman briefly unconscious. This forced him to miss two races while anonymous Formula 3000 racer Zsolt Baumgartner plodded around in his place, leaving no shortage of reasons to overlook the EJ13 when choosing a favourite car from a successful career.
And yet Firman doesn’t pick the Dallara-Mugen F396 in which he captured the 1996 British Formula 3 title, the Honda NSX in which he became Super GT champion with Daisuke Ito in 2007, or even the Reynard-Mugen 01L that set him on the way to F1 by winning the 2002 Formula Nippon crown. Despite the latter being “handling-wise and driving-wise probably the best car I ever drove”, the son of Van Diemen founder Ralph Sr can’t look beyond the Jordan.
“It's got to be the F1 car, hasn't it?” says Firman rhetorically. “That has to beat anything else.”
Firman is clear that the emotions that surround being a full-time F1 driver, even if only for one season, is what elevates the EJ13 to a prized status rather than its actual performance relative to the competition.
“Even though the Jordan wasn't the best one at the time, getting a chance to drive in F1 for a season is a very special thing,” he explains. “That technology is so far above anything else. They were, especially at the time, very lightweight, high-powered, high-downforce, nimble cars.”
But these descriptions were rarely used in association with the EJ13 in period. Having switched from works Honda engines to customer Cosworth V10s, Jordan slumped from sixth in the 2002 constructors’ championship to ninth in 2003. However, its lack of aerodynamic development was arguably a greater contributing factor than the change in powerplant.
Finances were tight, and the car ended the year at Suzuka hardly distinguishable from how it had started out in Melbourne. Firman concedes that lack of grip was its pervading characteristic.
"I wish I had another year [in F1], because there's quite a lot of people I raced against in lower formulas that I beat who had a long career there" Ralph Firman
“It was actually awful, I had unpredictable oversteer all over the place!” he says. “I never felt confident [and] comfortable in it.”
To add insult to injury, “for the whole season” Firman says he was “pushing the brake pedal on the way into all the corners, which was making it unstable” – but this was not picked up on the data. It is rather fitting of the narrative of Firman’s season, which is perhaps best encapsulated by his woes at Interlagos.
On what constituted the team’s last hurrah before Jordan was sold to Alex Shnaider on the eve of the 2005 season, Firman was a casualty of a suspension failure on the pitstraight as he braked for the first corner on lap 18. Having started from the pitlane and stopped one lap later than Fisichella to top off with fuel, Firman was running right in his team-mate’s wheel tracks when his right-front corner collapsed. By a stroke of luck, his out-of-control car avoided Fisichella before cannoning into the equally luckless Toyota of Oliver Panis.
Firman believes “I could have won or finished on the podium as a minimum in Brazil” as he was on the same strategy as the eventual winner. He regards it as “the biggest regret” of his racing career on a day “we were flying along”.
“That might have changed my career in F1, who knows,” he says. “I wish I had another year, because there's quite a lot of people I raced against in lower formulas that I beat who had a long career there, and it would have been nice to have got a shot at doing that.”
Firman’s last outing in the EJ13 came at Jerez in December, a matter of weeks after he’d enjoyed a memorable blast on the Macau Guia Circuit in a rare contemporary F1 demonstration run. Although there was nothing at stake, the winner of the Macau Grand Prix in 1996 wasn’t going to pass up on the opportunity to really “push it quite hard”. He recalls it as “a great experience”, even if his number of laps over the weekend were in single digits.
“We only got six or seven laps in I think, but it was great fun blasting around there,” he says. “I think everyone was most nervous about getting around the hairpin… We just turned up, they put a high-downforce package on and we cracked on with it.”
But typically for Firman’s year, not everything went to plan. He recalls coming closer than he would have liked to an expensive gaffe caused by, of all things, a local drinks vendor…
“I had a quick spin there, but got away with it,” chuckles Firman. “There was a guy selling cold drinks beside the circuit. We were doing the demo at the end of the day, after everyone else had run, so he must have sold all his drinks, dumped his ice bucket and it flowed under the barrier onto the circuit.
“A puddle appeared at the end of the main straight, I went through it and spun in the braking area of the first corner, but luckily I stopped before the barrier and kept going, pottered around. That could have been embarrassing!”
