MotorSport: When Eddie Jordan punched the air in celebration as he emerged from the Paris meeting that confirmed Giancarlo Fisichella as winner of the Brazilian Grand Prix, the camera captured an image of a team owner enjoying the triumph of his driver and his team.
Win number four in the bag. Fitting reward for an afternoon on which, despite the craziness occurring all around, the Jordan pitwall kept calm, did the maths and put their pilot in the best possible position to bring home some precious points. And he exceeded their wildest hopes.
But alongside the jubilation at notching the win, there was also palpable relief. For months now Eddie Jordan has had the demeanour of a man fighting a losing battle, a man who has developed the 1,000-yard stare of a combat veteran who has resigned himself to becoming a casualty of war. If you were to cast him as King Canute, his script would have had the old royal gently embracing the waves as they flooded the shore.
Brazil, though, has the smack of a tide-stemming event. If nothing else, those points represent a massive bulwark against their closest rivals, Jaguar, Minardi and possibly Sauber - whose C22 has been less than convincing so far. If Jordan does not score another point for the remainder of the season - and that possibility unfortunately exists - then it's certain to have put away Minardi, and quite possibly seriously dented the aspirations of Ford rivals Jaguar.
In three years, Jaguar's Milton Keynes-based works Ford-Cosworth powered team has delivered just two podium finishes, both courtesy of Eddie Irvine, at Monaco 2001 and Monza 2002. Just three races into its partnership with Ford-Cosworth, Jordan has delivered the company's 176th Grand Prix win. The benefit to Jordan cannot be underestimated. The $30 million-budgeted Irish team now appears a leaner, meaner, hungrier team than its somewhat bloated rival, which in the past has operated on a $100 million-plus budget.
The benefit in ending the season ahead of Jaguar is in the pursuance not only of good relations with Ford of Europe, through which Jordan's engine deal comes, but in demonstrating to Dearborn that it is a superior and cheaper alternative to the Jaguar behemoth.
There have been rumours (very much unsubstantiated) that Jordan's hope is to involve Ford in a greater, possibly part-ownership, way in his team and while that is a long shot, Fisichella's Brazilian win may have significantly shortened the range to that target. The further benefit to Jordan, and more crucial in the short term, is that Jordan, as a brand, once more becomes attractive to sponsors.
In the past, the chief selling point used by Jordan has been its image as a bunch of freebooters, cruising the shipping lanes of the paddock and plundering points wherever they could, and devil take the hindmost.
From personal conversation with a number of sponsor CEOs involved with the team, that carefully cultivated image has in the past been enormously successful in attracting business, particularly from companies aiming to position themselves as free-thinking, slightly radical concerns.
In recent years though, that image has suffered to the point that by the beginning of this season, the team was more Captain Pugwash than Bluebeard. The Interlagos adventure will have restored that sense of opportunism, the notion that Jordan is the little engine that could, and the wealth of television exposure garnered by Fisichella and his flaming EJ13 should once again make sponsors sit up and take note.
Coming at a time when three tremendous races have seen viewing figures skyrocket once more, and in a period when Ferrari has brought in Olympus, Sauber has involved Russian telcoms company MTS, and Williams is this week apparently going to announce a major new deal to replace Veltins, the omens for Jordan are good. What does that mean for Jordan in racing terms over the coming weeks and months? Little, in real terms. Jordan can still hope to slip into lower points positions. They will be hard to come by but as Interlagos revealed, strange things happen in this new look F1 world.
And the strangeness goes on, with the announcement that Ferrari is to delay the introduction of its F2003-GA until Barcelona after both Rubens Barrichello and Michael Schumacher had engine problems with the new car at Fiorano last week. Tellingly, Schumacher continued the bulk of his test work in an F2002.
There is also no sign of McLaren's MP4-18 breaking cover. With Williams still attempting to sort out inconsistencies with its FW25, Jordan's lot looks better and better as the front of the grid has so far remained static developmentally.
However, it also allows the Irish squad's rivals to make progress. This weekend at Imola marks the end of the traditional, testing-light, phoney war of the early season "fly aways". The trench warfare of the European season begins here. Relentless testing by the major forces will bring subtle changes in the status quo. Jordan can only hope it can hang on to the coat-tails of the advance. If Brazil yields sponsors, income and prospects, then that task will be made all the easier.
Meanwhile, two other small bits of gossip have been doing the rounds concerning Jordan. First, that Ralf Schumacher is on his way out of Williams and may be swapped for Fisichella before the season is out. Suffice to say that the Formula One media centre can be a mighty boring place between sessions, particularly when a Brazilian deluge is busy washing the paddock away.
And secondly, and even more outlandishly, vague twitterings surfaced last week that Jordan were on the verge of announcing a major new sponsor (quite possible) and also that Eddie Irvine is about to join the team as test driver. In the knowledge that the last heard of the swaggering former Jaguar driver was an e-mail photograph sent to an F1 journalist which showed Irvine at a party with two pretty young ladies with a message along the lines of "retirement's a bitch", the likelihood of Mr Irvine donning a race suit to plough an EJ13 around Silverstone on Jordan's 20-car testing days remains remote. Still, Nigel Mansell once tested a Jordan, so anything's possible.