With nearly 200 Grands Prix in twelve full seasons, Eddie Jordan is once again facing financial harships, once again fighting to survive in a sport he loves so much. Older and wiser, Jordan is in for the battle of his life. He is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting characters in the paddock and a man of different shades. But to understand his marking, one must travel back to his 'sickly childhood' - as his mother describes it - in the streets of Dublin. In his newly released book, 'Eddie Jordan, the Biography', Timothy Collings travels to Ireland and through time to bring a closer and rare look at the roots of EJ. Atlas F1 publishes exclusively a chapter from the book

'Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire,' wrote Edna O'Brien, in her superb memoir 'Mother Ireland'. 'Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare.' Her words stir feelings for Ireland that help explain the background that created Eddie Jordan, a man who loves his country and her women, his mother, his wife and his daughters.

Dublin is the capital of Ireland. In any season, it is a city of magic and music, literature and love, a place of passionate life and poetry and mysticism. It has energy and invention, imagination and humour. It is a city of writers like Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Oliver St John Gogarty, Liam O'Flaherty, J.P. Donleavy, Roddy Doyle, Molly Keane, O'Brien, Clare Boylan, Maeve Binchy, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Bram Stoker and, above all, James Joyce whose Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake were books that carried the English language into new intellectual territories fired by his brilliant imagination and stream of consciousness discourse.

Statues of Joyce and these other dazzling artists and others are all around the city, lending to Dublin the grace and air of a place where words are valued more preciously than they are in most others. Ulysses follows Joyce's characters around Dublin for a single day on June 16, 1904, on the day that Joyce met Nora Barnacle, and it ends with one of the most famous chapters in the history of literature, a discourse by Molly Bloom through her stream of consciousness as expressed in eight vast and unpunctuated paragraphs. Much of it was originally considered to be pornographic. The book was for a long time banned and not published in Britain until 1937 by when the tradition of great Irish writers and artists of passion was so strong it was an irresistible part of British and European life.

To visit Dublin is to visit the birthplace of Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Donleavy, Wilde, Swift -- and Eddie Jordan. EJ, of course, would not call himself a writer, but he is a lover of words and music and he is a real Dubliner, a graduate of the university of life and a man who enjoys a chat, a joke and a smile as much as anyone born on the banks of the Liffey.

Born on March 30, 1948, in Beechwood Avenue, Dublin, Edmund Patrick Jordan belonged to the city and to its heart. And he has taken it with him as his inspiration to the world beyond the Irish Sea. The district of his birth is known as Ranelagh and is within reach of Rathmines, the Leinster Cricket Club and Synge Street, where he later went to school, but more significantly where G.B. Shaw was born. The house of Shaw's birth still stands, in exhibition, re-decorated to 1838 fashions of décor.

To the east in the southern part of this great entertaining city of pubs, bars, eating houses, dance halls and entertainments lies Ballsbridge, once a centre for calico printing, Dodder Bridge, where EJ bought a small house after leaving home in his twenties' and Lansdowne Road, the venue for Ireland's rugby internationals against England, France, Scotland and Wales and where Jordan sold smoked salmon on the pavements to inebriated supporters.

Further south lie the Wicklow Mountains, Blackrock, Dalkey, Killiney, Enniskerry and Bray where he spent much time as a child with the relatives and family relations of his father Patrick, an accountant with the local electricity board, and his mother Eileen, and his older sister Helen. Bray was away from the bustle of the city and away down to the coast. As a child, Eddie was a sickly boy. He suffered from 'Pink's Disease' and this prevented him putting on weight sufficiently quickly. He took his time in growing to full strength and learned to make do through other means what he could not gain immediately from physical attributes.

He was determined and resourceful and he loved dancing and girls and he exhibited all of these qualities frequently. But the Ireland and the Dublin he grew up in then was not the place that sits there now enjoying the relative prosperity introduced by European grants and the 'euro' and the trading that has come with the nation's decision to open its doors to the world beyond the British. Where now there are salons dedicated to cappuccino there once were glorious celebrations of Guinness, the black beer that has been as emblematic of Ireland as the harp

Ireland, O'Brien and many others have said, has always been 'Godridden', as filled with religion as it is with magic and wizardry, influenced by the Druids as much as the music and mirth that fills the pubs and dance halls of the city of Molly Malone. 'You are Irish,' wrote O'Brien, again, 'you say lightly, and allocated to you are the tendencies to be wild, wanton, drunk, superstitious, unreliable, backward, toadying and prone to fits, whereas you know that in fact a whole entourage of ghosts resides in you, ghosts with whom the inner rapport is as frequent, as perplexing, as defiant as with any of the living. To meet one's kinsmen is to unleash a whole sea of unexpected emotionalism.'

All this borrowing of words from others is to help stir up a feeling for the Ireland that Jordan was born in and grew up in. It is an island of imagination and develops dreams of escape, re-births, as O'Brien described them, but it is a place, too, that always brings people home, lost Irishmen looking for their source, third and fourth generation descendants, or long-ago-gone-away Americans returning to find their forebears. Ireland, in short, is no ordinary place filled with pragmatic or gloomy people, but a party-loving land of magic and hangovers and wistfulness and wonderful dreams and ambitions.

Pete McCarthy, whose best-selling book McCarthy's Bar, is written about 'a journey of discovery in Ireland' throws up many of the childhood smells, the rural bliss of natural dairy products, potatoes, plain living, agricultural smells, raspberry-jam sandwiches made with sliced white bread, home entertainments, beer and pies, tea and scones, hard outdoor physical work, drinking and partying and enjoyment and reeling in the 'craic' and old-fashioned courtship and God-fearing religion and love and metal baths. It is an Ireland of another time and age than that of modern Dublin, but it is an Ireland closer to the place where Jordan grew up.

In his sickly childhood (a description offered by his mother that, according to his unreliable memory is not too accurate) there were no televisions and no computers, no electronic games and no late-night shops, but there were people and families and girls with dancing lovely Irish eyes and there was always warmth and humour and love and togetherness. The humour, often, is a touch bawdy or saucy. In 'Mother Ireland', O'Brien tells a tale of urine stories. 'Urine stories were sauciest, especially the one about the parish priest who, suspecting that his housekeeper was helping herself to his sherry, decided to dilute it with urine, and after weeks of this and still the level in the decanter flagrantly going down, he tackled her about it and she said, 'Oh, Father, I put a drop in your soup every day...'

A minute in Eddie Jordan's company and it is easy to understand his heritage of wit, his Irishness, his Dublin roots. It is where he is from, alright, and the noise and energy that he produces makes amplifiers redundant because Jordan's positive exuberance and optimism can light up a gloomy room in a dark field miles from nowhere with no call for electricity. He has always been like this and this field of personal energy comes from his birth, his source, his mother, his Ireland, his Dublin, his joy of life and his confidence to go out and scoop it up in his arms and dance with it every day.

His joy and his rhythm are derived from being in tune with life around him and from the music in his head. Even at the worst of times, Jordan can raise a smile. Even at the best of times, he can share a self-deprecatory joke with anyone and bring the most pompous occasion down to earth. His richest and most important Formula One sponsors have suffered this indignity. He is the Dubliner, after all, who knows the musicians, who plays the drums and exudes the sounds of his birthplace and his childhood and his schooldays, but he has also the determination of a human being that began its fight for survival when it was only a tiny child.

"Well, he was a very ill baby, to be sure," said his mother Eileen, a formidable woman in anyone's estimation, a woman who at 85 years old was still playing golf once a week, driving herself to the club, enjoying a round on the course, taking a glass of wine for good health and then driving home without anyone's help. "He was only a few years old and he was back to the weight he was born, so I mean he had a very poor beginning. It was a big worry. He had a disease called 'Pink's Disease' which meant that his liver was not functioning properly and that took a long time to get working. But, other than that, he grew on. At five years of age, he had pulled up out of the disease, he started school and he did rightly."

It is hard to imagine that the strong, healthy, wealthy and happy man who owned the Jordan Grand Prix team in middle age had started life as a sickly child, nursed closely by his mother, watched over by his older sister and fretted about by his father. But it is true and it is one of the reasons that Jordan went to school at the local Milltown National School on the southern fringes of Dublin until he was 11 when he transferred to the famous Christian Brothers School (CBS) at Synge Street in Dublin.

"He went to the national school because it was near me," said Eileen Jordan. "But he was a determined little child. Always. In fact, too much so. He was fond of the girls and he was fond of dancing and very fond of music. A difficult handful, a difficult boy." At school, she said, he was not an academic star, but instead he preferred to concentrate on other pursuits including sport, his social life and his budding career as a businessman. "Ha, ha!" she laughed when talking of Jordan's schooldays. "What was he like at school? Mediocre. Good enough. He was good at maths, wasn't good at English, quite good at Spanish, although he left it then and he wouldn't know two words of Spanish now. But he was quite good then. What else? Sport? Always, yes. He was always very competitive and he was very good at sport. He started doing golf and was very good at that. He liked to be in the teams. He was in the teams for football and for hurling and all that type of thing. He was quite good."

It is little wonder that Eddie Jordan has the gift of the gab, a love of music, enthusiasm for sport, a wheeler-dealer's brain and the loving loyalty of a typical Irish family man. His life has been one long nurturing session punctuated by trips into magical experiences and some tough learning fields. The CBS School in Synge Street, in Dublin, is the place where he went to school and learned to adapt and survive in life. At first, he thought he wanted to be a priest, as a result, then a dentist, then a banker or accountant. Finally, he became a racing driver and one of Ireland's greatest entrepreneurs. He found his escape and re-birth, but never lost his love of his roots.

The CBS in Synge Street is a high-building surrounded by schoolyards in a cramped old residential area of Dublin, a good ten minutes' walk south from St Stephen's Green and beyond Camden Street, where Jordan was later to work in the Bank of Ireland. It is surrounded by busy streets crammed with shops, pubs, bistros, cafes, building works, road works, wind-blown crisp packets, boys, girls, cars and the eternal chaos of the city.

On the day of my visit, the upstairs reception at the school was also busy. A boy arrived with a bleeding nose and waited in a queue along with others who were in need of a writing implement. They had neither a pen nor a pencil and needed one or the other. "I've been robbed, Miss," said the pen-less pupil. "I've no pen now." "Oh, now, you've never lost your pen have you?" is the soothing reply as a second-hand Biro is handed over in trade for the blarney. So, you think, as you sit in that hard-benched reception area, so this is where it all began. The birthplace of the art of persuasion, the mother of invention and rogue grins and charm. The place may be a little run-down, but it has a toughness that belies its interior of security, warmth and calmness. There are few signs, notices or plaques and the modern uniform appears to be trainers and ski-jackets, but there is a happy air of schooldays around the place.

The list of famous past pupils tells much about the quality of the place. It includes many politicians, journalists, sportsmen, actors and musicians and reflects the richness of experience in Jordan's own life. The list includes Liam Cosgrave of the Taoisech, former Minister for Finance Richie Ryan, former Fianna Fail Minister Dr Michael Woods, Sean Moore, a former Lord Mayor of Dublin, the great television broadcaster Eamon Andrews, Irish international footballer Don Givens, swimmers Liam Bolan, Brian Battielle and Mark Battielle, the athlete and actor Jim Norton, Donal Deonnelly, an actor, Michael Donnelly, a Lord Mayor of Dublin, Fr. Tom Burke who started the Young Scientist of the Year scheme in 1963, Cornelius Ryan, who wrote 'The Longest Day', actors Milo O'Shea and Noel Purcell, singer John McNally, actor Owen Roe and more in modern times.

The school was founded in 1864 and, according to the prospectus, is a school of great tradition renowned for its academic, cultural and sporting excellence. 'Our school values its genuine Christian spirit which is manifested in the respect shown to each member of the school community, whether management, staff, teacher, pupil, parent or past pupil. This is reflected in our school structures which are based on democratic values.' It is a religious school and it was no wonder that Jordan was touched by the idea that he may have had a calling to work as a priest.

"The aim of the religious education given by the school is to develop the whole person and impart Catholic values which will be a foundation for a full and happy life," the school prospectus explained. "Students are given the opportunity to deepen their faith and to respect the beliefs of those of different persuasions. A new oratory provides opportunities for class Masses and other liturgical exercises. The school welcomes and facilitates pupils of other faiths."

There is no doubt that Jordan was a fully-integrated member of the school submerged in all of its beliefs and values. The way in which he seems to have used those values in the foundations of his business practices in his team, through consultation and a strong sense of family, has reflected the value of his schooldays to him in all of his life. But he was not a model pupil. He was too independent for that. He had his own ideas, his own outlook, a feature developed in him during his childhood before he arrived at CBS in Synge Street.

There, in his earlier years as a young scholar, he sat next to Frank Burke who, years later, has returned and remains as a teacher. "I think we met for the first time in 1956,"he remembered. "Together in school. We were in the same classes together for five years in primary school and then for one year in secondary. We were split up then after the first year. I remember him coming to school and back on the train."

Burke remembered Jordan as an unexceptional scholar, but as a boy with obvious social, sporting and entrepreneurial skills. "Well, we were all kind of middle of the road," he said. "I was probably about division two and he was division three if you think about four divisions. We probably didn't work hard enough because of our interest in sport. But Eddie always had entrepreneurial skills. Undoubtedly. He was always wheeling and dealing. He used to sell a comic to me - Roy of the Rovers - and he would buy it and then sell it on again at half price, but he would have read it too. It wouldn't have surprised me if he had been in marketing, put it that way. It was not unusual to me to see him going into the bank and he was always a great sports aficionado..."

The teenaged Eddie Jordan developed a taste for both the good life and the good things in life. He liked to have his clothes prepared as fashionably as possible and he maintained an image. He also enjoyed going out, attending big sports events and the company of girls. But Burke recalled only one social occasion when they were together. "The only time Eddie and I socialised was when we went to the Theatre Royal one afternoon. We didn't really live in the same area. We saw a film followed by a show and that was the first time that I met his mother. She dropped him off outside. He was really a class-mate to me more than anything.

"His father worked for the ESB (Electricity Supply Board) as far as I can remember. And I think I heard something about him playing for Shamrock Rovers. I don't think he was in the first team, but his father was definitely interested in sport. He took Eddie along to watch the Gaelic football at Crook Park and when he was involved at Shamrock rovers he would of course have been into soccer. I am certain Eddie went out to sport regularly and I think that is one of the great common denominators he has with his wife Marie now.

"Our school was very famous for sport. I don't think it is as good now as it once was. But then a lot of academic standards are not as good now. But at the time when Eddie and I were at school here, it was always in the top ten in the country. We had all sorts here from Ministers' sons to working class children. The quality of the education here was excellent and you just had to look at the roll of the past pupils to see it was absolutely top-class. We were all ambitious and we had no fear or any trepidation about the bigger world.

"Eddie was involved in everything and anything that was going on. Somebody started a football team, I remember, that was all pretty cloak-and-dagger stuff and I think Eddie was involved in that! We weren't allowed to enter the team under the school name. It was a league and he would have chanced his arm. He would always come to the fore if anything was going on. But Eddie never drew any attention, or any notoriety, to himself. He was always well behaved. The discipline was very tough. Very tough. There was no quarter given.

"There would have been at times about 500 to 600 applications there for 150 places and in one case there was 700. So the school was creaming off the crème de la crème of the students so you just didn't draw any attention to yourself. Most of the students came from the south of the Liffey and came from all quarters really, thanks to the railway line."

Jordan's own recollections of his schooldays with the Christian Brothers are of strictly disciplined activities. He remembered his childhood in Dublin 6, a postal district on the fringes of the city where he and his sister and his parents lived in a comfortable semi-detached four-bedroom house at the end of a cul-de-sac and his days spent down at Bray, 12 miles away on the coast, where his many relatives had homes and he passed many summer days.

His was an orthodox middle-class childhood once he had beaten the threat of Pink's Disease, but it was not a wealthy one. He and his family did not have a television when he was growing up and it is this that encouraged his intuitive musical ability, his individuality and character and his ability to play the spoons. Those that had the dreaded boxes from which America transmitted its advertising messages were the first to succumb to the changes which have swept around the world and turned the most individual of countries into popcorn colonies. "What she said ruled," said Jordan, reflecting on his mother's role in his childhood.

"My father was on a salary, but they didn't go out a lot. I can remember my father and my mother going to a banquet or a posh dinner maybe only four or five times while I lived at home. Those things just didn't happen. We weren't poor, but we had to be very careful. Ireland was a relatively poor country when I was growing up, but somehow that helps to make you much closer as a family."

Instead of television and affluence, the Jordan family was interested in Ireland and Irish things. Ireland was a land rich in culture and tradition with a strong emphasis placed on folklore, poetry and music and all of these things struck a chord with the young Jordan. Life centred around home, the local football team and the pub and, without television or computers, each family made its own entertainment. "Even when I was still in my mid-teens, we still didn't have a television at home," he said.

"I remember having to walk a mile or so down the road to a relative who had a television set to watch a European Cup final. It's important to remember that we had to amuse ourselves mostly in those days. The big thing at family gatherings was standing up to do your own party piece - singing, playing an instrument, dancing or just telling a story. Everyone had to take his or her turn and, of course, it did your confidence the power of good. I learned to play the spoons. It was cheap, it was easy and it made a lot of noise."

Jordan's skill with the spoons has developed into a love of music and an ability to play the drums. Some in the music business say he is a good enough drummer to have considered turning professional; some in the motor racing business wish that he had. Either way, his love of both, derived from his early life in Dublin, has given him a full life in which he has packed music, theatre, entertainment, sport, business and golf and skiing and fun.

He revels in a bit of the 'craic' (an Irish word that means fun delivered through a mixture of jokes, insults, banter and wild behaviour) and can be relied upon in modern Formula One to provide the best hospitality in the paddock and the loudest parties. But, as his formidable mother Eileen has pointed out, there is a harder and competitive edge to this man, too. He will scrap for his fair share of the rewards in life and he does not like to be cheated out of what he thinks is rightfully his, though he has had to suffer a few tough experiences to learn this.

"I can become quite violent at times," he admitted. "I had a terrible temper when I was young and I've since learned to keep it under control. But, it's always there in the background, although it takes a huge amount to bring it to the surface. When that happens, it's not something I'm particularly proud of. I'm like a lot of Irish people in that I am probably at my most dangerous when my back is against the wall.

"People talk about the 'fighting' Irish, a term which really comes from the time when the boys would be like warriors on the building sites, working hard all day, getting out of their heads in the pub and then fighting all the way home. But those images are not so prevalent now. The same basic trait of bloody-minded determination remains. There's nothing wrong with that, provided you have some fun along the way. That's something I learned as a boy and it has stood me in good stead ever since."

EJ's childhood has been part of him ever since. He has remained an even-handed person who draws on his family values. "I try very hard to treat everyone the same and that means that everyone will get the same amount of abuse," he said. "I don't know whether it is my Irishness or what, but if I was English I certainly wouldn't be able to swear as much as I do. People hear me talking to sponsors and they wonder how I get away with it. They think the relationship will be over in no time at all. But the fact is that if you're not verbally abused, then you're not appreciated!"

Anyone who knows Eddie Jordan will know that is true, but that is also true that he appreciates the company of more people than any other team owner in Formula One. His very Irishness, from his childhood, shines through from within every day. His father, Paddy, was a very different kind of person, however, and preferred a quiet life. An accountant with the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), he enjoyed a quiet pint at the pub, avoided fuss and took deep satisfaction from sport. "He was a very soft man," Jordan recalled with affection. "He was a quiet and stable kind of person. I am different. I take after my mother."

Eileen Jordan has always been a ball of energy, a whirlwind and an achiever. Even in her dotage, as a lady in her mid-80's, she remains formidable. She can look after herself. She can manage to drive, cross the road, climb difficult steps and do all she needs to do without any help, thank-you very much. And she will not suffer fools. She is polite, when required, but only briefly. To obtain an interview with her for this book required three months of patient diplomacy and long-suffering hopeful waiting, but in the end it proved worth the waiting. If anyone wondered how Eddie Jordan learned to talk with such force, colour and energy, Eileen is the answer.

In the Jordan family life, she is the one pushing and driving for more and more in life, but with a sense of proportion. She worked until the 1970's, she always cared about appearances, she had aspirations and enjoyed a good life. She had the vision and the drive and the belief that she, or any of her family, could achieve all they wanted. She also gave them total and unquestionable support, the kind of backing that can make a man believe he can do anything, even, perhaps turn his dreams into reality, build castles from the sand, turn a love of racing cars into a business that entered Formula One as one of the world's top Grand Prix teams. Yes, Eileen, thanks. Eddie knows it comes from your spirit even if he did it himself.

Michael O'Carroll, one of the best known men in Irish television sport, an executive producer for the Irish station RTE, had a heart attack in 1979. He was recovering in the local hospital where, at that time, Eileen Jordan, worked. "She used to come and see me every day," he told James Allen, for the F1 Racing magazine.

"She would bring me the paper and she would spend time telling me to put this experience behind me and get on with my life and so on. She really motivated me not to lie down after this setback. She is such a very powerful woman. And she adores Eddie. She always watches the races and she reads every article about him. She is a typical Irish mother. They're a bit like Italian mothers, always taking care of their boy, cooking all the meals, making sure they look smart and giving them everything they need to get on well in life."

Though EJ prefers to deny it, or shrug it aside as only partly true, he is in the habit of telephoning his mother every morning to stay in touch. The call is made from wherever he is, in whatever corner of the world. There are times when he misses a day, but it is not liked. It may only be the briefest of calls to say 'hello' but it matters. It is a call that holds the fabric of his life and his humanity together. "He only rings to make certain that I'm still alive and, of course, if I'm not then he can have my house!" she said, roaring with laughter at her own self-effacement.

Eddie admitted that the idea is reasonably true and accurate, a vague notion in his mind since he prefers to use approximations for everything, in general terms, but responded with his own confirmation of these early-morning touchstones in his family ritual. "If, for some reason, I don't call her," he explained. "The next time I call she'll give me the old 'ah, well, you're very busy' in that way that all Irish mothers have."

Eileen is the key to the Eddie Jordan success story. She has the fortitude, determination, humour and dry wit, not to mention the energy, imagination and sheer joy of life to fuel an army. Yet, for many years, after her son had left home, she found it difficult to reconcile herself to his ambitions and his decision to leave Ireland for England and a career in motor racing.

Her own family history had been punctuated by much of the pain of conflict in Ireland's 20th century history, her father having been shot dead by the Black and Tans, a brutal regiment of the British army that had been sent to Ireland to control the uprisings after World War One. For Eddie, this meant the loss of a grandfather and that single act also plays a part, in its own deep-rooted way, of helping him drive himself to the level of achievements that he has achieved and still seeks to add to with further achievements. His mother's life is the bedrock of his own, her pains and wants are his, too, just as his near-idyllic childhood days were given to him by the kindness and love of his family.

"I was born in Dublin, but most people would prefer it to say I was born in Bray," he said. "My parents had just moved to Dublin, but my aunt and the people who looked after me, obviously my parents, but during holiday times all the rest of the family... Well, it was so fantastic because during holiday times there was a train at the bottom of the road and I used to get out to Bray for next to nothing. And what you have to understand about Bray, in those days, is that before Spain and places like that became so popular to visit, Bray was the place to go. Instead of people going to Skegness, or Plymouth, or Brighton or wherever, Blackpool, hordes and hordes of them came to Bray for their holidays. It was Ireland. It was cheaper and it was tax-free.

"So, at this time in my life, I was about 12 or 13, I was getting a sense about a bit of the girls and a few drinks. I remember my aunt used to have an account with the local grocer and I would be sent down to collect the groceries and unbeknown to her, like a pound of butter used to come at regular intervals, so they used to be transferred into flagons of cider and, in the afternoon, you would go up to the Monkey Pole that was at Bray Head and it was just great...It was a famous thing, this Monkey Pole, that was halfway up the Bray Head - and that's a mountain. If you can visualise, there was this mountain that people used to walk up, there was a golf club, and things like that, there and you looked down at this beautiful-shaped beach.

"And, I remember, I fell in love with a girl from Leeds. I suppose I was 13 and she was blonde and she used to write to me every day and my mother used to go absolutely 'ape' about it. And if she didn't write to me at least once a month, I would go absolutely mad myself. I suppose I was in school then... That, I think, was the first idea my mother had about losing me. Not losing me, but being sort of a bit wobbly. I always liked the girls and she knew it. And, anyway, that's why you had to be in with the lads from Bray."