(first appeared in The Guardian 31 December 2003)

Frankly, I'm a born optimist. I've always taken an upbeat view of my involvement in the formula one business but there's no doubt that 2003 was a real emotional roller coaster.
After the early optimism generated by Giancarlo Fisichella's win in the Brazilian grand prix, which was the high point of the season, came the dramatic low of our lost legal action against Vodafone over what we believed was a commitment to sponsor our team.

Serious money was involved here, several million pounds. I was really shocked by some of the critical comments made by the judge against me and I was obviously concerned about the repercussions for the team.

There was absolutely no doubt in my mind about the sincerity of our case, but the verdict did hurt us. That said, people move on and put these things behind them.

The biggest disappointment was that we didn't manage to build on that Brazilian grand prix win; that we were unable to keep up the momentum. We'd taken a huge gamble, fuelling Giancarlo's car up for a long final stint and betting that, in the wet conditions and with cars flying off the road in all directions, the race would be stopped before we'd completed the full distance.

People say that Jordan have only won races, or done well, when we've been lucky. But the truth of the matter is we've taken some strange strategies and sometimes they've paid off.

In the end, I celebrated our victory on the Eurostar coming back from Paris after the FIA had investigated all the timing information and concluded that we'd won. That was strange, obviously a bit of an anti-climax, because people in motor racing very seldom look back. So when we finally received the trophy from Kimi Raikkonen, who'd originally been hailed as the race winner, a fortnight later at Imola it was all rather yesterday's news.

For the rest of the season it was all pretty disappointing. We were never able to give Giancarlo or Ralph Firman the equipment they deserved on a consistent basis. We were scraping the odd championship point here and there.

It's bloody frustrating in this business trying to scrape by on a small budget when you can see the top teams operating on perhaps five times your money. But there's no point in complaining, that's how it is.

Most of the high points turned out to be off the track. People always tell me I'm rather in awe of rock stars. Well, I suppose it's true and when we had U2's Bono and his family as guests of the team at the Monaco grand prix I obviously felt pretty chuffed.

Overall, though, it's been a big struggle. We had a poor British grand prix with Giancarlo suffering a suspension breakage and we ran out of steam towards the end of the year.

People go on about "Do I want to retire? Do I get pissed off by the disappointments?" Look, I don't want to go on about what a great team Jordan is, but you've got to think about this objectively. I never thought we were going to get through pre-qualifying when we started in formula one back in 1991 and I'm a lucky sod; I usually get lucky. Who says Jordan can't win a world championship? Of course we can.