Gary Anderson: It's a great life.

As one of grand prix racing's foremost designers in recent times, Gary Anderson has seen a wealth of changes within the sport, but he insists despite much public criticism Formula One is better than it has ever been.

The Irishman began his career at Brabham back in the early 1970s, and since then has gone on to work for McLaren, Ensign, Jordan, Stewart Grand Prix and Jaguar Racing over a 30-year period that saw his cars win a brace of grands prix against sizeable odds. From his origins at the bottom of the tree as a lowly mechanic, Anderson's genius saw him rise up through the ranks to become in turn chief designer and technical director of some of Formula One's leading outfits.

"I came across from Ireland in 1972," he explained to Crash.net. "I was 20 years old when I arrived in England, and I met up with a young lady who now happens to be my wife. She wrote a letter to the Brabham team, which was owned by a guy called Bernie Ecclestone. There was another guy called Colin Sealey who was running the production department. They made Formula Two and Formula Three cars and all sorts of stuff.

"My now wife wrote this letter for me one night to say I was a mechanic and was there any chance of a job? I got a letter back from Colin two days later saying there were no vacancies, then I got another letter the next day from Bernie to say there was one! So motor racing started off looking pretty confusing to me and it continued that way! I started working as a mechanic for Brabham at the end of 1972. I built Formula Two and Formula Three cars to begin with, then in 1973 they asked me to join the Formula One team and off I went."

It was not long before the 54-year-old's design capabilities saw him promoted to the role of chief mechanic with the British equipe, alongside the revered Gordon Murray. Although he would go on to work for McLaren, Anderson said he had derived the greatest satisfaction from his stint at privately-run Irish concern Jordan, where Eddie's boys waged a constant David vs Goliath battle against infinitely better-funded opposition.

"Eddie's team was always very family-orientated," he explained. "Everybody there counted. Because it was a small team everyone had to be capable of multi-tasking. It was impossible not to be. We started out as a tiny organisation in one of the units at Silverstone. That's where Michael Schumacher came and chatted to me on the bench before his debut Formula One test. It was a good little team.

"I never saw myself as being a small cog on a big wheel as such. I was always a small team man and I always believed the small team could beat the big guys. Maybe I would have done better to go off and make lots of money with a big team, but my challenge was to go and take them on and on a good day we could and did beat them. Teams like Ferrari and McLaren have 800 or 900 people each; we had 28 people at Jordan when we first went to Phoenix in 1991 and over time we managed to race with them and beat them - it wasn't just given to us because they had a bad day. That's far more satisfying than the routine of just going to races because you're in a big team.

"For sure, financially it would have been a much better deal for me, but I believed we could keep the relatively small team attitude and working operation and challenge the big guys, and I felt it was better to be a part of that than be lost in a big team. I like to know how many sugars a guy takes in his coffee. You need to know all the people by name, their kids and families, and that never happens in a big organisation."

Indeed, many of the happiest moments of Anderson's career came with the small Jordan squad, and he picks out Canada in 1995 - when Rubens Barrichello and Eddie Irvine finished second and third on the day Jordan old boy Jean Alesi won his first and only grand prix - the team's maiden grand prix victory at Spa-Francorchamps in 1998 and Giancarlo Fisichella's inspired wet weather triumph in the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix as particular highlights.

"Whenever you see your driver standing on the rostrum at a grand prix when you are competing against the likes of McLaren, Ferrari, Williams and Benetton as it was in those days, it's really special," he said. "In Brazil in 2003 with it was just something I felt was going to happen. With the way the weather was at that time I thought 'let's just fill the thing to the brim and get as far as we can' because I've got a feeling in my water. We were leading by a lap when the chequered flag came out."

Another experience he says will remain close to his heart is that of his time spent at Stewart Grand Prix, where he held the position of technical director from 1998 until the end of 2000 following the squad's handover to Ford under the title of Jaguar Racing.

"Jackie Stewart was the best person I've ever worked for in my life," he enthused. "He is a three-time Formula One world champion, and by being involved in motor racing for so long and having experienced the ups and downs of it he knew what it was all about. You could really talk to Jackie about motor racing - it was something he truly understood. He understood all your frustrations and anxieties; he understood when you could fix something and when you couldn't. That was a fantastic experience.

"When he sold out to Jaguar and Ford came in it was a different deal altogether, and I didn't really get on with those people. That's when I decided to run my career down a bit - I had been at it long enough. I came back to Jordan for a couple of years but the team had changed. They had run out of motivation and out of money."

Money, indeed, is one of the key factors that makes Formula One go round, and Anderson believes the injection of vast sums of it by Ecclestone have been pivotal to the series' tremendous development over the past three decades.

"It's just a completely different world now," he admitted. "Bernie has done a fantastic job with it and moved it to where it is now. For my first Monaco Grand Prix I drove a transit van there with a trailer and a Formula One car on the back of it. I got there late one night and parked outside the Hotel Diana where we were staying. I woke up in the morning to all this noise, looked out the bedroom window and they had set up a vegetable market on both the car and trailer! It was an open trailer and they were selling cabbages and so forth off it! I had a bit of a drama getting the car out of there and down to the track.

"Formula One has gone from that to what you see now, a multi-million dollar industry. I suppose the negative side to that is that when I was doing it back in those days it was a sport. Now it's more of a business, but then I suppose for all the teams back in the early seventies it was a business too - I just didn't really understand that at the time. But overall I think the whole thing has changed for the better all-round. There's a lot more people involved, a lot more money in it and a lot more professionalism about it. One thing I would like is for it to be a bit more accessible to the people - it's a little bit distant now - but it's the way Bernie wants it. He wants to keep it at arm's reach and not too close. I think I've seen the best years of Formula One's changes. It's been a fantastic era.

"You travel the world, see lots of hotels, race tracks, ferries and aeroplanes, all sorts of stuff. I wouldn't change a day of it. I've always been quite determined, no matter what I've been doing in my life. I always want to try and do better. I went through what you might call Formula One's time of opportunity. It was a period during which the sport changed dramatically. I was lucky to start out as a mechanic on the spare car in 1973 and I ended it as technical director of a Formula One team. Very few people have that kind of opportunity. It's a great life."