A YEAR ago at the French Grand Prix and Eddie Jordan has the look of a party conjuror who has just unwrapped a handkercheif to reveal a perfectly formed pocket watch that a few seconds ago had been smashed to pieces by a hammer.
From the cracked face of a season gone wrong, Jordan had pulled a perfectly ticking machine in the shape of a deal with Honda which he proclaimed would secure his team's future. One year on, though, as the team's trudles its cars across the English Channel for another French Grand Prix, alarm bells are ringing again.
In January, at a deliberately low-key launch designed to avoid the hyperbole and the unattainable goals set at previously glitzy launches, it was hard to keep the ebullience at bay. Drivers Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Jarno Trulli were bursting to sing the praises of the EJ11, a car both reckoned could win them races, a car that was streets ahead of the ambitious built doomed EJ10. Australia couldn't come soon enough.
Nine races into the season though and the wins have failed to arrive. For that matter so have podium finishes. In nine races Jordan have scored just 13 points, have finished just nine times from 18 starts and have been eclipsed by a Willams team just a year and half into their rebuilding programme with BMW and by perennial midfield strugglers Sauber.
Unlike last year, the roots of Jordan's problems do not lie in one area. In 2000, the illness was easily diagnosable-a car that did not build from the successes of 1999 but which was built in an attempt to make the quantum leap from a second and a half off the pace of Ferrari and McLaren to racing in the same time zone as the big two.
Ultimately it was a step too far and saddled with a gearbox as fragile as the ego of the team's lead driver, Jordan slumped to their worst season since 1995, when in the first year of its rocky relationship with Peugeot, the team finished the season behind the Ligier Mugen-Hondas of Olivier Panis, Martin Brundle and Aguri Suzuki.
This year has been different. In nine races, Frentzen and Trulli have been done down by an alarming array of technical glitches, from Trulli's misfire in Australia, to gearbox failure for Frentzen in Austria and Trulli at the Nurburgring, to hydraulic failure for the Italian in Monaco.
Eddie Jordan is of the same opinion. "I think they are quite different seasons, " he said after last weekend's race. "I firmly believe we have a much better grip on things this year and what you have to understand is Heinz has just come back from two incredibly difficult races where he clearly wasn't fit enough and Jarno had this problem where, for a variety of reasons, and it's down to all of us, he has this problem finishing races."
Trulli's inability to finish races is, at the moment, a minor concern. The Italian has proven lighting quick all se3sason and has not let himself down once this year, all his non-finishing being cause by failures. The more pressing problems are Jordan's troubled relationship with Honda and the collapse of Frentzen as a force in Formula One.
Honda's reputation in Formula One is one of rapid and sure success. In 186 grands prix contested it has taken 71 wins, a win-rate better than Ferrari, Ford and Renault, the team's major competitors. Yet the current R001E engine has been a consistent failure this year. Both Frentzen and Trulli and BAR's Jacques Villeneuve and Olivier Panis have been afflicted by engine failure.
More often that not these have occurred in the preliminary sessions of the weekend, but the number of engine changes being undertaken by Honda and its team is rapidly approaching one a race weekend.
The apparent fragility of the engine is compounded by the unit's relative lack of power. The Jordans and BARs are consistently between six-tenths and a second slower than their chief rivals.
Such has been the poor performance at Jordan and BAR that, until the week before, the European Grand Prix speculation was rife that a dissatisfied Honda would pull its support from one team at the end of this season. In the end, the Japanese marque was forced to take the unusual-for it- step of issuing a statement that it would continue with both teams in 2002.
The vote of confidence does not, however, mask continuing dissatisfaction at Honda. When Jordan qualified seventh and eighth in last weekend's European Grand Prix, Eddie Jordan praised his drivers on so strong a showing against Ferrari, Williams and McLaren. Honda's technical director, Kazutoshi Nishizawa, dubbed it merely "mediocre".
The problems, according to Nishizawa, exist on both sides of the racing fence. "we are building up a good relationship with both teams but still the development speed is not quick enough for us," he said recently. "At Honda, we do need to improve the engine performance but the teams also must improve at their end."
Honda insist that they will unveil a new evolution of their R001E in the near future which should offer a much-needed power boost to Jordan. But even if that evolution solves the problems of power deficit and apparent fragility, Jordan still have the problem of Frentzen.
The German, whose option has been taken up by Jordan for the second year of the two-year he signed last year, has appeared a spent force this year, lurching from crisis to crisis in a car he admits he cannot come to terms with and slumping to a seven-to-one qualifying rate in favour of team-mate Trulli.
Watching the German drop two places on last weekend's start and then almost eaten alive by Jaguar's Eddie Irvine, who later admitted he had found it hard to believe that he could match the Jordan driver's pace so easily, was like watching a prize fighter slouch on the ropes, absorbing blows while waiting for the clock to count its way down to payday.
"I Just can't get the best out of myself," Frentzen said last month. "it's just because we are not calibrated enough, myself and the car. I've tried everything but at the moment there's no harmony between myself and the car."
It may seem a little over-the-top but in this there are echoes of the Damon Hill of 1999. The Briton limped through a disastrous last season at Jordan, claiming, like Frentzen, halfway through that he could not understand the car and could neither get the best from himself nor the car.
Frentzen's malaise is surely not quite so terminal, but when the Frentzen to Toyota rumours were at their most furious a fortnight ago, there were many in the paddock who quietly voiced the opinion that Frentzen should have taken the deal to see out the twilight of his career at a team with low early expectations in the sport and against a journeyman team-mate whom he could confidently beat.
Spent force or not, Frentzen is unlikely to profit from the EJ11 and in that case Jordan's hopes of a two-prolonged assault on fourth in the championship look shot.
Eddie Jordan though is insistent that the team will keep fighting. "we've never laid down before and we won't start now," he said after the European GP. "This was all too disappointing though. I made the point before the race that the top three teams are getting more powerful, more reliable and they're faster and we have a fair amount of work to do.
"There's a motivation thing as well, where I've got to do everything possible to keep everyone's spirits up but it's a bit difficult when you're getting pasted week in and week out. We really weren't quick enough to compete with the top three teams and when the top three finish all their cars then there's no points for Jordan."
As Jordan stumble into the second half of the season, hobbled by an engine programme far behind schedule and one driver suffering through a crisis of confidence Eddie Jordan's reasoning of the Formula One paradigm shows no sign of needing reassessment.
