For nine successive years, the F1 season ended with Suzuka and Adelaide a fortnight apart. Sydney was a favourite place to spend the intervening weekend. This is the afternoon of Saturday, October 26, 1991 as Jean Alesi and Eddie Jordan take a boat ride around the harbour. It was completely unplanned – as such events with Jordan tended to be – and started when I and two colleagues, lying low in a motel on Pacific Highway, discovered Eddie was staying in a posh hotel on the waterfront.
Lunch in Jordan’s – a fish restaurant which, naturally, EJ insisted we simply had to choose – was washed down with chilled Chardonnay as we shot the breeze and, among other things, discussed Ayrton Senna’s extraordinary rant the previous Sunday. Despite having just been crowned world champion for the third time, Senna spent the post-race press conference launching a vitriolic attack on how FIA president,Jean-Marie Balestre, had favoured Alain Prost at the same race during the previous two years. It had been breathtaking in its content and invective-flecked delivery.