New book by Laois native Keith O’Loughlin honours Formula One legend Eddie Jordan

When Eddie Jordan passed away in March 2025, his friend and business partner, Keith O’Loughlin, felt a deep need to capture the life and spirit of one of Formula One’s most charismatic figures. The result is Eddie Jordan: Full Throttle- Lessons from a Life of Motorsport, Money and Mischief. 

Reflecting on what inspired him to write the book, O’Loughlin, from Rosenallis, recalled the closeness they shared.

“Eddie and I were business partners and just very close friends. We lived five minutes walk from each other in Monaco, we did a lot of business all around the world and spent time together. We cycled together a few times every week and we were very close. I was involved in all of his business stuff and he was involved in pretty much all of mine. I spent a lot of time with him in Cape Town in the three months before he passed away. He was a big showman when he had an audience; he was brilliant, he was the life and soul of every room he went into, but when you got him on his own, he was very introspective and very interested in what people did and would just give advice. Sometimes the advice was to tell you what to do and sometimes he would be just telling you stories about how he became successful. 

“I was interviewed on a business show on RTÉ radio a couple of days after he passed away. I had written out just some business things that I had learned from him over the years and because we've done a lot of business together. We raised three billion pounds to try and buy a company called Playtech. We didn't end up going through with it, but that takes a lot of work to raise that kind of money. I put together some of the business lessons and put them into an article. After the interview, I was like, actually, there's some good stuff in this and then I put the article on LinkedIn. I then got probably 40 or 50 people who said that it should be made into a book, so I sat down one day and said to myself, let me see what it would look like as a book and it just took its own life at that stage,” O’Loughlin recounted. READ MORE BELOW PICTURE.

Keith O'Loughlin and Eddie Jordan cycling

Writing about Eddie, he explained, was not just a professional undertaking but a personal one that helped him channel his grief.

“I'm pretty determined as a person. He passed away on the 20th of March, and I wrote the book and set up his foundation. I launched both of them on the 20th of May, literally two months later, with Prince Albert in Monaco. So I just got stuck into it, which is what I do with everything that I do, just get stuck in. My parents passed away when I was a good bit younger, and I remember when they passed, I felt very grateful for having them in my life and knew I would carry their essence and a kind of torch or baton in some ways. I've always felt that with the loss of people, I look at how lucky I was to have people in my life rather than to spend a lot of time just being sorry for me or for them,” he explained thoughtfully.

O’Loughlin’s own journey from a small village in Laois to a global entrepreneur offers a window into the determination and vision that would later define his partnership with Eddie.

“My dad was from Rosenallis, and my mother was from Clonaslee. They were very forward-thinking and entrepreneurial people. I went to secondary school in Ballyfin, and at that stage, we had a pub, a shop, we ran a local post office, and my father had a farm, probably had a couple of hundred cattle. At the same time, he was running a meat factory in Kilkenny, building the local community centre and training the local hurling team, which went from junior B to senior under his leadership. Our house was always moving; there was never any downtime. I remember when I was 15 and we had the pub in Rosenallis, and my parents went away on holiday. I said, ‘Well, I'll stay, so I ran the pub, you wouldn't be able to do it these days, but I did. READ MORE BELOW PICTURE.

Eddie Jordan and Michael Schumacher

“Also, when I was the same age, I had a huge interest in technology and computers when no one else did. I ended up helping smaller businesses and did all their system work. I did it for Hinch Plant Hire in Mountmellick and a couple of other local businesses. So I would do all their technology when I was 14, 15, 16 years old. Then I went to Trinity in Dublin, and I suppose from there, the jobs that I did were all international. I was travelling up to 140 flights a year. The last kind of job I did, I had a thousand people working for me around the world. I think we had 12 offices around the world. It was a huge business, and it eventually sold for 1.2 billion dollars,” he recounted.

It was shortly after this that O’Loughlin met Eddie Jordan, a meeting that would change the course of his professional life.

“And then just after that, I met Eddie Jordan, and I was like, well, I don't particularly want to be working for anybody else anymore. Eddie had kind of retired, but he was bored of being retired because he was like, ‘this is bullshit, I just love doing deals.’ That's when we met, and we were doing deals. Then, I had been working and living in Gibraltar, I was running the Coral Sports betting business out of Gibraltar, and we'd merged with Ladbrokes, so it was a big business. I was living there and Eddie rang me one day and said, ‘why don't you just move to Monaco, it's a much better crack?’ I was like, well, Gibraltar in the south of Spain is very quiet apart from the summer season, whereas Monaco isn't, so that's what kind of brought me here,” O’Loughlin recalled.

Beyond their business partnership, Eddie’s character inspired O’Loughlin to create the Eddie Jordan Foundation, a lasting tribute to his friend’s values.

“So interestingly, Eddie lived between Cape Town, Monaco and London, but if you went into any of his houses, he had no trophies, no plaques on the wall, no pictures of Jordan Formula One; he had nice pieces of art and stuff like that. He wasn't a man into trophies; he didn't like cars. He loved Formula One because it was a way to help him be successful and win, but he had no interest in cars. He drove standard BMWs, and he wasn't into fast cars or flash cars at all. Also, at one stage, he had a private jet and the biggest Sunseeker yacht ever built, and yet he had got rid of those. In London, he would take the bus, and when we'd go in for a pint, I'd say, ‘will we get an Uber?’ and he'd say, ‘No, let's jump on the bikes.’ He lived a very ordinary kind of down-to-earth life. I could be with him, and Bono would text him, or Bob Geldof would text him, or even Roy Keane. I mean, anybody in sport or business or whatever, he had a huge network of friends, which are all in the book, we've got 64 tributes in the book from people,” O’Loughlin said. READ MORE BELOW PICTURE.

Eddie Jordan, HSH Prince Albert and David Coulthard

“The background to the foundation was thinking this man doesn't particularly want statues or trophies, he was interested in people, and I spoke to his wife after he passed away, Marie, and I said, ‘look we have to kind of commemorate him how he would have wanted it to be and that's making his spirit live on by helping people.’ So we help people in sport, in business, in music and in sailing, four of his great loves, and we do it by sponsoring some people to go to university. So, for example, we're sponsoring five graduates to go to Trinity College this year, and we'll sponsor some to go to colleges in the UK and in Cape Town, where he lived,” he continued.

“There’s also a learning programme to teach people how to understand how Eddie was successful and the kind of basic principles of being successful in life, which are covered in the book to a degree, but the kind of training programme for the Eddie Jordan Foundation brings it to a much deeper level, and then we'll also connect people. So somebody says look I want to be connected up into somebody in Formula One. Well, we've got loads of people who are connected to the foundation who are in Formula One who are in business. We provide mentorships and we might provide some small seed funding for people, but it's not about giving people large amounts of money. What we're about is helping people to be better so they can make money and be successful with their own principles and we give them the connections and start that we can,” O’Loughlin elaborated.

The book also captures Eddie’s philosophy through 25 core principles, designed to inspire readers to think bigger and approach life differently.

“One third of the book has these 25 principles. Some stuff like, think big, which sounds simple, but Stephen Roche in 1985, he talked to Eddie, and he said, ‘Eddie, I'm a bit of a dreamer.’ This was two years before he won the Tour de France and the World Championship in the Giro d'Italia in 1987. Roche said, ‘people don’t seem to understand when I say my dreams.’ Eddie’s reply was, ‘Stephen, if you say your dreams out loud, and if people don't laugh at you, then you're not thinking big enough.’ That's just one of the principles, and Stephen Roche said he's quoted that now for the last 40 years to people. That’s just one of the 25 principles that are in the book, which are just about how to get people to think differently. Like, Eddie never took anyone who said no; what he heard was, okay, I need to ask the question differently. Like, no was not an option,” he revealed.

“The book is kind of full of stories about how he was successful, and the way he got around obstacles, because people didn't give up too rarely. The middle bit has those 25 principles, and then there's 64 tributes from the likes of Bono, Bernie Ecclestone, and Roger Taylor of Queen, Michael D. Higgins, Micheál Martin, Enda Kenny and Shane Lowry. They're all there, and they all give their perspective as to how they interacted with them. It's an interesting book, and there's a little bit in it for everybody, both entertaining as well as some life lessons,” he added.

Finally, O’Loughlin reflected on the reception the book has received and the sense of purpose it brings, not just to readers but to the Foundation itself.

“I was definitely nervous enough, to be honest, because I'm a tech entrepreneur, and I've three daughters, and they're all better at English than I am. I'm not even the best writer in my own house, never mind writing a book. I was nervous about it, but it's in the Irish non-fiction charts, so it's gone down very well. I've had a lot of feedback from people who say they've got something from it, one little thing, or they've changed something, or done something from it. For me, if it helps anybody in any way, then it's worth it. All proceeds and all profits from the book go to the Eddie Jordan Foundation, so it's also great to see that the more successful the book is, that it helps the foundation to help other people as well. It's a great feeling, but yeah, I was definitely nervous,” he concluded warmly.

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