30th November - Car manufacturers must be accountable - EJ.



Eddie - concerned the manufacturers might leave.
Despite the major achievement of getting the works Honda engines for 2001, Eddie has often expressed his concern at the amount of car manufacturers entering F1 in recent years.

Speaking recently in Autosport magazine he said that the teams in F1 must remain as these are what made the sport great in the first place. "The teams are the people who are the fibre - the bedrock - of what he made F1 strong, Bernie Ecclestone and the teams are the people who have given huge stability to the sport. We are the people who will be there on the dry days and the wet days in 50 years' time."

Fiat, Renault, Ford, Daimler Chrysler, and BMW, are all looking to buy shares directly in Formula 1 from German media group EM.TV, which currently owns half of the sport.

"The manufacturers are very welcome, and should be a part of the EM.TV programme, or equity participants in teams and F1 as a business," added Jordan. "But I have made it very clear that I'm nervous about manufacturers taking over whole teams. The whole fibre of F1 teams has historically been based on individuals such as Jackie Stewart, Frank Williams, Ron Dennis, Tom Walkinshaw or myself coming in and taking the intensive risk to start."

Jordan said that he is looking for firmer contracts between teams and manufacturers in the future: "I believe that a company such as Ford has an obligation, having taken the benefits out of its marketing exercise, to make sure that the team itself is allowed to stay intact and is turned to a new owner in good and proper working order," he said. "They can let it go, but they can't just chop it. In all other walks of life, major corporations regularly say, 'this is no longer part of our plan' and - swoosh - it's gone. I want to see guarantees from those manufacturers."

Honda and Renault are two examples of teams who have in the past walked away from the sport, only to come back in the last year or two. This can be done, admittedly with some pain, if they are just a supplier to a team, but if they own the team itself, and several leave at once, the sport will be thrown into disarray.