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EXCLUSIVE The roaring, glittering story of the Playboy of the Western World - OLIVER HOLT goes in search of 'Fast' Eddie Irvine, Ferrari's last British star who duelled Michael Schumacher, brawled with Ayrton Senna and now lives a Gatsby-esque life of wonder We went on the trail of Irvine ahead of Lewis Hamilton's Scuderia debut this weekend in Australia Join Mail+ for the best insider reporting on Formula One, plus more from your favourite writers and columnists in our world-class team By OLIVER HOLT Published: 12:00, 13 March 2025 | Updated: 12:05, 13 March 2025 e-mail View comments There is a point on the tight, twisting coast road that meanders between Santa Margherita Ligure and Portofino, the jewel of the Italian Riviera, where it passes a nightclub set above a shingle beach. The building is fashioned from rough stone and built to look a little like a grotto. Weeds sprout from its masonry.
It has seen better days. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the glitterati flocked here to Covo di Nord-Est . Aristotle Onassis moored his yacht at the dock below the club that now rusts quietly in the spring sunshine, Brigitte Bardot, Roger Vadim, Jane Fonda and Nat King Cole were regular visitors and swum and sunbathed in the cove beside it.
In the 80s, another regular patron, Frank Sinatra, even performed a concert at Covo. He opened with Fly Me to the Moon and continued that June evening with Summer Wind , Strangers in the Night and My Way before losing it out with The Lady is a Tramp . It must have been quite a night.
The place looks as if it has barely had a lick of paint since. Giant posters of Sinatra still dominate the deserted lobby but the upholstery on some of the sofas grouped around one of the porthole-style windows is ripped and scarred. The place reeks of faded glories and the flight of time’s arrow.
The taps for the sinks in the toilets didn’t work when I was there last week and the windows were dirty. On one end of the stone arch that straddles the road between Covo and the hillside, someone’s smalls hung on a washing line in the sunshine. The kitchen was cavernous.
There was only one chef in it. Irvine is the last British driver to win a grand prix for Ferrari, ahead of Lewis Hamilton's debut for them this Sunday Irvine, then of Jaguar, with Brazilian model Isabeli Fontana at the Monaco Grand Prix in 2002 Irvine is F1’s last playboy of the western world but he baulks at that description The breath-taking views of the Mediterranean from the upper deck have not changed but the décor is shabby and faded and the jet-set moved on to new destinations long ago. Even though the outdoor restaurant still attracts a dribble of tourists, the nightclub only opens once a week, for a Saturday night disco.
In other words, it represents a rather attractive investment opportunity for an astute businessman with a considerable fortune and someone who might have a taste for the high life. I know someone who fits the bill: sometime last year, it became the latest acquisition in the burgeoning property empire of Eddie Irvine. Irvine, the last British driver to win a grand prix for Ferrari, will be a reference point this weekend as Formula One and the wider sporting world look forward to the eagerly-anticipated Scuderia debut of Lewis Hamilton at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne on Sunday.
Last September, I asked Irvine if he’d like to talk about his time in the sport, the four times he took the chequered flag for Ferrari in 1999 and came within two points of winning the drivers’ world title, what it was like being Michael Schumacher’s teammate and his famous altercation with Ayrton Senna during and after Irvine’s F1 debut at Suzuka in 1993. I’ve known Irvine for more than 30 years, after all, and always liked him. He was an iconoclast when he broke into the sport and he’s an iconoclast now.
In the days when he frequented nightclubs rather than owned them, I went with him to Lillie’s Bordello in Dublin and stayed at his house in Dalkey. I mentioned to him recently that I remembered his place there on the coast to the south of the city had turrets. ‘No,’ he said.
‘That was my next-door neighbour’s house.’ Who was your next-door neighbour? ‘Van,’ Irvine said. Which would be Van Morrison to you and me.
Anyway, Irvine said he didn’t want to do an interview. ‘I get asked often to talk about the past,’ he wrote in a WhatsApp message, ‘but I really have zero interest to do so. I just don’t see the point.
I retired 22 years ago and nothing I did then matters to me for some weird reason. Sorry to disappoint.’ I persisted for a little while and asked him if there was anything else he would like to talk about.
He mentioned Covo and said it might be fun to chat about that someday. He said I should go and visit. He owns a place in the hills there, somewhere among the summer palaces on their promontories.
I just shouldn’t expect him to be there. Covo di Nord-Est on the Ligurian coast, the latest acquisition of Irvine's property empire The nightclub is set on the stunning surroundings of the Ligurian Coast John McEnroe plays a guitar concert at the Covo di Nord-Est in 1994 There is something that fits about Irvine owning an establishment that was once a symbol of La Dolce Vita , the code which governs his own sweet life. Irv the Swerve will be 60 this year but he seems ageless.
How best to describe his romantic life? It seems to have involved a lot of models and actresses. He is prepared to admit to one long-term relationship. He sends a picture of his boat, Anaconda , moored in Exuma.
‘In two years,’ he writes, ‘we will have been together 30 years.’ His existence, what little I know of it, seems to leap out of the pages of The Great Gatsby. He is worth somewhere north of £100million with a property empire that stretches half way across the world.
The closest thing he has to a home is his own island in Exuma, near the Bahamas, but he spends time in his native Ireland and northern Italy and Miami. He owns the Exuma Yacht Club, too, which he has big plans for. ‘It’s one of my babies,’ he said in a voice note.
And there is a sports club that carries his name in his native Northern Ireland that he has built up into a centre for karting, indoor football, F1 simulators, Pickleball and Padel. I spoke to a friend who lives 15 minutes from the centre. ‘Everyone loves Eddie here,’ he said.
Irvine is F1’s last playboy of the western world but he baulks at that description. Anyone who has been as successful as him does not live a life of ease. Sometimes, he says, his existence is ‘90 per cent work’.
Sometimes, the odds seem as though they are stacked more towards pleasure. A few months ago, I sent him a picture of me and a couple of our mutual friends – former Jordan commercial director Ian Phillips and his wife, Sam - at a restaurant in Oxford, Gee's , where Irvine used to eat regularly when he raced for Jordan in the 90s. He sent one back of him and some companions in a sumptuous sushi restaurant in Milan.
On Christmas Day, he sent some footage of deer on the lawn of one of his houses, accompanied by a soundtrack of him singing Jingle Bells . ‘Merry Christmas from Eddie and his reindeers,’ he said. Pictured here with team-mates Nicola Larini (second left) and Michael Schumacher, plus Ferrari team president Luca di Montezemolo Winning the 1999 Australian Grand Prix for Ferrari, the first race of his final season in red Irvine and Schumacher were team-mates at Ferrari from 1996 to 1999 When I said I’d like to come down to meet him near Portofino, he sent a picture of his seaplane bobbing on cobalt blue water next to the jetty of his island.
It was another way of saying he wouldn’t be there. Irvine does what he wants, when he wants to. He refuses to be a slave to a diary.
He does not make appointments because, if he made appointments, he would have to keep them. I asked him if he was going to Melbourne for the race on Sunday and he said he was. As a guest of Ferrari? ‘No,’ he wrote.
‘I don’t do any official stuff. Don’t want to have a schedule.’ Irvine was always smart, always astute, way, way sharper than anyone gave him credit for when he was racing for Jordan, Ferrari and Jaguar in Formula One in the 90s and early 2000s.
Way better as a driver, too, than anyone gave him credit for. He made a brilliant debut at Suzuka in 1993 when he made a blistering start in his Jordan and passed a string of rivals in the first two corners. Later in the race, having been lapped by Senna, he had the audacity to overtake the great Brazilian and finished in the points in sixth place.
He was rated highly enough to earn that move to Ferrari and in his first race for them in Australia in 1996, he outqualified his new teammate, Schumacher. When Schumacher broke his leg in a crash at Silverstone midway through the 1999 season, Irvine led Ferrari’s charge, won those four races and came within an ace of the team’s first driver’s title for 20 years. Since he left the team at the end of 1999, no other British driver has completed a season with Ferrari.
Oliver Bearman drove a single race for the Scuderia last season when he was a late substitute for Carlos Sainz at the Saudi Arabia Grand Prix but apart from him, there is a clear line from Irvine to Hamilton. Sometimes, it felt as if Irvine was underestimated because of his insouciance and his absolute refusal to respect the establishment. That endeared him to journalists and fans but not always the FIA, the sport’s governing body, or to Senna.
After that stunning debut for Jordan at Suzuka, Irvine was sitting on a massage table in one of the prefab huts that served as team motorhomes at the Japanese Grand Prix venue at the time when the door flew open and Senna burst in. Ayrton Senna on his way to fight Irvine at the 1993 Japanese Grand Prix after the Brit unlapped himself Irvine dives past Senna to complete controversial move that Senna was furious with Phillips was one of five or six people in the room. He remembers Senna looking rather red in the face and wearing an expression he had not seen before.
Gerhard Berger, Senna’s friend, had been teasing him about Irvine’s impudence in unlapping himself and fed him a glass of schnapps to wind him up even more. When Senna appeared, Phillips says, Irvine lifted his head and said: ‘Are you looking for me?’ The journalist Adam Cooper, a friend of Irvine’s from their days working in Japanese F3000, switched his tape on when Senna walked in. Irvine refused to accept he had done anything wrong in unlapping himself.
He said he had just been racing and Senna grew more and more infuriated. ‘You're not racing,’ Senna yelled. ‘You're driving like a f***ing idiot! You're not a racing driver, you're a f***ing idiot.
’ Irvine’s nonchalance wound him up even further. ‘You be careful, guy,’ Senna said. ‘I will,’ Irvine replied.
‘I’ll watch out for you.’ ‘You’re going to have problems, not with me only, but with lots of other guys, and also the FIA,’ Senna said. When it was clear that Irvine was not for turning, or apologising, Senna took a wild swing at him and knocked him off the massage table before a couple of McLaren officials rushed to restrain him.
The clash became the stuff of instant legend but Irvine still resents the attention it received. Lewis Hamilton is hoping to become the first British Ferrari driver to win a Grand Prix since Irvine ‘Suzuka '93 is so long ago now that it doesn't register,’ Irvine told Cooper two years ago. ‘It's like something that happened to somebody else - it didn't happen to me.
The 'fight' is 0.0001 per cent of what I remember about the race - it's totally not important. ‘It got me attention, but for the wrong reasons.
It was my first grand prix and I went round the outside of four or five cars in the first two corners, and that's what people should have been talking about. I don't think it did me any good, I really don't.’ Things did not quieten down quickly.
At the first race of the 1994 season, Irvine was blamed for a spectacular four-car pile-up at Interlagos in Brazil, fined $10,000 and banned for a race. Read More JONATHAN McEVOY: Lando Norris is the undisputed favourite to win the Formula One title Phillips remembers accompanying Irvine to the resulting FIA hearing in the splendour of its headquarters in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Max Mosley, the then FIA president, was outraged because Irvine turned up for it in jeans and a pink sweater.
He’s still the same Irvine now. He loves his life. He does not dance to anyone else’s tune.
He works hard, he makes money, he lives fast. I asked him recently if he was pleased with the outcome of a business dispute. ‘I’m always pleased,’ he wrote.
‘I’m a lucky man.’ I asked him to throw me a couple of bones and he played along. How should I describe him, I asked.
Property developer? Businessman? International man of mystery? Playboy of the Western World. The screen ticked for a minute and I could almost hear him laughing as he sat beneath palm trees by the side of his swimming pool in Exuma, thinking up a suitable reply. Eventually, the phone lit up.
‘Land artist,’ he wrote. And was there anything he missed about Formula One, anything at all. Another pause and then a response.
‘The only thing I can think of is the youth I had when I was racing.’ Lewis Hamilton Share or comment on this article: The roaring, glittering story of the Playboy of the Western World - OLIVER HOLT goes in search of 'Fast' Eddie Irvine, Ferrari's last British star who duelled Michael Schumacher, brawled with Ayrton Senna and now lives a Gatsby-esque life of wonder e-mail Add comment Comments 0 Share what you think No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards.
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