Motor Sport interview: Kevin Magnussen

Where do you start when your task is to interview a Formula 1 driver who is also a friend? To be clear, having worked in F1 for a third of a century, I am chummy with dozens of F1 drivers past and present. But I am close friends with only a few.

“So, Kev, I begin,” sitting in my study at home in London, seeing my old mate in front of me, on a Teams video link, driving through pretty roads in rural Denmark at the wheel of what appears not to be a supercar or anything like one, “what are you driving?”

“A Merc Sprinter van,” he replies. “I’m towing my new kart to a test session. It’s a proper gearbox kart, a quick one, and I’m going to enter the Danish Shifter Karting Championship in it.” And there you have it, in a nutshell. A 32-year-old veteran of 185 F1 grand prix starts Kevin Magnussen may be, but it is racing for its own sake that floats his boat. Yes, he loves Monte Carlo, but not for the mega-bucks or the super-yachts. “Monaco is fantastic in a modern F1 car. Massenet and Casino Square are an awesome challenge, almost unbelievably quick,” he says. If you want to make him happy, give him something with wheels and an engine and ask him to race it as fast as it’ll go.

How about a left-field opening question. “Are you aware that you hold two Formula 1 records?” I ask him.

“No, what are they?”

“Well, the first is that you scored 18 world championship points on your grand prix debut, which is a record, because others such as Jacques Villeneuve [second in Melbourne in 1996] and Giancarlo Baghetti [first at Reims in 1961] did what they did when the points scheme was different. Oh and you’re not going to like the second.”

“What is it?”

“Most grands prix started without leading a single lap. You top the list with 185. Martin Brundle is second on 158, by the way.”

There is a pause, then a chuckle. “Well, I guess my two F1 records accurately reflect how it was. That was my F1 career, wasn’t it? A great head start followed by a long tail end.” It was indeed.

In that great head start, on his F1 debut in Australia in 2014, Kevin finished third on the road, which became second after the disqualification of Daniel Ricciardo, to Nico Rosberg – who, like Magnussen, is the son of an F1 driver. But their childhoods could hardly have been less similar. Nico was born in Germany and raised in Monaco and Ibiza – the doted-on only child of his mother Sina and his father Keke, the 1982 F1 world champion turned successful businessman – and his upbringing benefited from not only parental love but also wealth, privilege and social advantage.

“I’d shown flashes of good form but I’d crashed too often”

“It wasn’t like that for me,” says Kevin. “We really didn’t have much money at all, because my parents were extremely young when I was born. My dad [Jan Magnussen] was 18 and my mum [Britt Peterson] was 17. You could say that when I was a baby they were only kids themselves. Although they were together for my early childhood, she stayed in Denmark to look after me while he went off to the UK to race in Formula Ford. I always say that me and my mum grew up together, because my dad was in England trying to get established as a teenage racing driver. I only saw him when he came back home from time to time.

“It was my uncle, Erik, my dad’s brother, who pushed me to race. He’d been helping my dad in his karting days – he’s a brilliant mechanic – and he’ll be helping me when I’ll be karting this year. Full circle, eh?

“Erik taught me and his adopted son, my cousin Dennis [Lind, the GT driver], how to race. Me and Dennis are the same age, and Erik was mega-ambitious for us both, starting us at just two years old. He made us practise three times a week. Obviously I can’t remember it, but that’s what he tells me. And, by the time we were four or five, he was pushing us hard. Maybe not quite as hard as Jos [Verstappen] pushed Max, but not far off it. Erik used to stand next to the kart track, with his foot placed on the edge of it, indicating where we should brake for each corner. If we braked before the mark, he used to give us hell. If we braked after it, he wouldn’t mind at all, even if we crashed. He was hardcore. But it worked, because eventually we learned how to brake where he wanted us to brake and still get around the corner. And when we’d done that, he walked a metre closer to the corner and made us brake later still.”

I am reminded of what Trevor Carlin – who ran Magnussen in British Formula 3 in 2011, during which year they won seven races together – told me about him a few years ago. “Someone once asked me which driver Kevin’s driving style most reminded me of. I had a good think before I answered, then I replied truthfully: ‘Ayrton Senna.’ I particularly remember Kevin’s braking. No one I’ve worked with has ever stopped a racing car quite like Kev did.” We will examine exactly what that means later.

After British F3 in 2011 Magnussen moved up to the Formula Renault 3.5 Series in 2012, racing for Carlin again, and 2013, now with DAMS. In the first of those two seasons he won at Spa and finished second at Aragón and Hungaroring, and the next year he was champion, winning at Spa again, Aragón, Paul Ricard, Barcelona, and Barcelona again, and bagging eight further podium finishes.

By that time he had been a member of McLaren’s Young Driver Development Programme for three years, which is how he and I had first come into contact with each other, since, as McLaren’s then comms/PR chief since 2008, I took a great interest in the YDDP.

“After 2012, when I’d won a Renault 3.5 race, I’d shown flashes of good form but I’d crashed too often, Martin [Whitmarsh, McLaren’s team principal] told me that I had to win the Renault 3.5 championship or he’d chuck me off the YDDP. But there was another YDDP member racing in the same championship that year, Stoffel [Vandoorne], and Martin said to us, ‘If one of you wins the championship, you’ll be racing for McLaren in F1 next year.’ So there was enormous pressure on both of us.

“I had the talent, I had the speed, but I needed support”

“I’d been dreaming of racing in F1 since I was a little kid. So in 2013 it felt like my life depended on winning. Honestly, that’s what it felt like. I remember thinking: ‘If I don’t win the championship this year, my life will be shit.’ So I gave it everything, absolutely everything. I won five races – six if you count the one I was disqualified from at Paul Ricard – and I remember one of the races at Hungaroring particularly well. It was raining unbelievably hard – F1 would never run in such weather these days – and qualifying had been interrupted four times, and I had a wheel hub problem, stopping me getting a proper quali lap in, so I started the race from P16. The safety car led the field for the first five laps, and after that I just cut loose. I left no margin anywhere, absolutely flat-out even as it began to rain even harder, and I ended up finishing second. When I passed Stoffel I remember feeling really good. That’s no criticism of him by the way. He’s a great driver and a nice guy. But obviously it was important that I beat him.”

McLaren’s drivers in 2013 were Jenson Button and Checo Pérez. Both were fine, talented wheelmen, and Button, then an ex-F1 world champion of 33, was particularly consistent, extracting the maximum out of our MP4-28, which was not a great car. Pérez, who was just 23, was less reliable, less affable, less polished and less disciplined – a shortfall which irked our chairman Ron Dennis,

Nonetheless, Whitmarsh offered Pérez a contract extension, intending that he would race alongside Button again in 2014. A number of us had hoped he would choose Magnussen instead. Three of us – sporting director Sam Michael, team doctor Aki Hintsa and I – lobbied Dennis to overrule Whitmarsh. In the end he did just that.

“To be fair to Martin,” Magnussen reminds me, “he’d lined up a Force India drive for me in 2014, which he was able to do because McLaren was helping Force India with various technical inputs at the time. I even did a seat fit for them at their Silverstone factory. Then, one day in the autumn of 2013 when I was at Woking doing a simulator day, I became aware of a weird vibe. Sam passed me in a corridor and smiled at me in this really kind of meaningful way; then you did, too; then Aki texted me to say that good things were happening; then finally Anders [Holch Povslen, the Danish billionaire industrialist who had bankrolled Magnussen’s drives in feeder formulae] called me and said, ‘It’s changed. You’ll be racing for McLaren, not Force India. Ron and I have sorted it.’ I was thrilled.”

In January 2014 Whitmarsh resigned – his relationship with Dennis at a low ebb generally and having been countermanded on a key decision, namely driver selection – and Dennis, who had been chairman for some years, took back his old role of chief executive officer. From now on, he told us, McLaren would once again be his train set.

“The strange thing is, I didn’t feel a whole lot of pressure on the flight down to Melbourne for my first grand prix. I was still in my 2013 ‘I’ve got to win everything or else’ mindset, and I remember thinking to myself: ‘I’ve got to win this race.’ I didn’t win it – I finished third on the road, which ended up being second after Daniel’s disqualification – and, even though I knew that was a great result for a rookie on his F1 debut, I’d wanted more. But I enjoyed standing on the podium with Nico and Daniel, seeing and hearing tens of thousands of people shouting and cheering. It was an amazing moment. But I’d got used to winning and, well, I hadn’t won, had I?

“It was only after that race that I began to feel pressure. I remember Jonathan [Neale, managing director] and Éric [Boullier, racing director] telling me, ‘Lewis [Hamilton] was an average of 0.15sec faster than Jenson in qualifying over the three years they raced alongside each other, so, to retain your drive for next year, you should be aiming to beat Jenson by the same margin.’ I accepted it at the time but, looking back, it was unfair. Lewis and Jenson were both F1 world champions, far more experienced than I was, and Jonathan and Éric were telling me that if I wasn’t as good in my rookie season as Lewis had been in his third, fourth and fifth F1 seasons, I’d be out.

“That was crazy – and also disrespectful to Jenson. I was almost encouraged to regard him as easy to beat, to underestimate him in effect. Well, he was a really good driver. It so happens that in 2014, if you average out our qualifying performances, I did beat him by more or less what they’d asked me to beat him by, but in the races he was brilliant – wise, strategic, good with tyres, clever with weather. Now I wish I’d stood up for myself. I was naive. But, in my defence, I was an F1 new boy. Inevitably, that unfair weight of expectation heaped unnecessary pressure on me, and I began to make mistakes.

“It was a ridiculous set of expectations to push onto a 21-year-old rookie. I had the talent, I had the speed, but I needed support mentally and emotionally, and the senior McLaren management on the racing side offered the opposite.

“And then Jenson and I learned that Fernando [Alonso] would be joining the team for 2015, which meant that obviously one of us was going to get the chop. In late 2014 there was a boardroom meeting to decide who’d race for the team in 2015, and the vote went seven-two in my favour. Only Mansour [Ojjeh] and [Shaikh] Mohammed [Bin Essa Al Khalifa] voted for Jenson. They’d been lobbied cleverly by Jenson’s manager, Richard [Goddard]. Together, Mohammed and Mansour had a majority shareholding, so they used that power to overrule everyone else, including Ron, who’d voted for me, and in 2015 I ended up being the reserve driver, which meant nothing really.

“But Ron said, ‘Trust me, you’ll race for us in 2016, or maybe even before the end of the 2015 season.’ And, honestly, I think he was being sincere. That really was his plan for me. So, when Williams contacted my then manager Dorte [Riis Madsen] about me racing for them in 2016, I talked to Éric about it, and he said, ‘No, stay with us, you’ll race for us with Fernando next season.’ And, honestly, I think he was being sincere, too. So, reassured by both Ron and Éric, I didn’t pursue the Williams option.

“But I became depressed in 2015, I don’t mind admitting that. I lived to race, and I wasn’t racing. I had an offer to do some Super Formula races in Japan, which would have been cool, but Ron said I shouldn’t. In 2016, when Stoffel was the McLaren reserve driver, Ron let him race in Super Formula, and he loved it, winning a couple of races, so I don’t know why Ron didn’t allow me to do the same thing the year before, but anyway he didn’t.”

“I’d gone from F1 to watching my mate race a Porsche at Le Mans”

Increasingly bored as his torpid 2015 wore on, Magnussen began to amuse himself by doing slightly silly things. He spent the Thursday before the Spanish Grand Prix sunbathing on the beach in Barcelona, he fell asleep, and he appeared in the paddock on the Friday comically sunburned. Neale and Boullier were furious. He went to the Le Mans 24 Hours race with some of his mates, travelling there in a Volkswagen campervan. En route they rented motorbikes one afternoon. Kevin fell off his bike and injured his leg. When they got to Le Mans, he sat among regular fans on the outside of the Dunlop Curve, still in pain, drinking beer. “I remember sitting there, seeing my mate Michael [Christensen] go by, lap after lap, and wondering how I’d gone from racing a McLaren in F1 to watching my mate race a Porsche at Le Mans in just a few months. It was then that I thought to myself, ‘What have I become? I simply must get a grip of the situation and find a way to race in F1 next year, because nothing is certain at McLaren, and if I don’t get a McLaren drive next year I may never race in F1 again, whatever Ron or Éric tell me.’”

Bad luck continued to dog him. There was a nightclub fracas on the eve of the Chinese Grand Prix, resulting in an early flight home. Then, listless while in Denmark, he was offered a day’s testing on a speedway bike – “just for fun” – but he fell off it, injuring his hand. I think he told Neale and Boullier a white lie about that mishap – “I fell off a bike while training” – allowing them to assume erroneously that it had been a mountain bike. But, even so, the scuttlebutt at Woking was now that Kevin was becoming something of a wild child, a bit frivolous and too accident-prone.

The truth was that Magnussen was but a pawn in a very complicated chess game. Dennis was angry that, although he was the chief executive officer, he had been overruled on driver selection – ironically just as Whitmarsh had been at his, Dennis’s, behest 12 months before – and he wanted to right what he saw as that wrong by pairing Alonso with Magnussen instead of Button in 2016. But boardroom politics are always tricky; McLaren’s boardroom was highly political at that time; and perhaps Ron was not fully aware that he was beginning to lose control of the company, but he was, and he was eventually removed by the board before the end of 2016. Kevin was (in)famously sacked on October 5, 2015, his 23rd birthday, via an email sent by Dennis’s personal assistant Justine Bowen, which was not Ron’s finest hour.

“But I’d had a test with Porsche, an LMP1 shoot-out against a number of other drivers, and I’d done well in it, even though my hand was still painful after my speedway shunt, and I thought, ‘It’s OK, I can be a Le Mans driver for Porsche, just like Michael.’ I got the drive, and I was all set to race for Porsche in 2016 – but then ‘diesel-gate’ happened at the end of 2015 and Porsche pulled the car I should have been in. I felt very lost. I’d almost given up on life. Then Toto [Wolff] called me and offered me a Mercedes DTM test – another shoot-out against a number of other drivers – and again I did well. Gary [Paffett], who’d won a ton of DTM races, was there to set a benchmark lap time, and I beat him, so Toto offered me the drive for 2016.”

Suddenly, another option materialised – a drive for what had recently been the Lotus F1 team but was now about to be renamed Renault again, replacing Pastor Maldonado, who had raced (and often shunted) for the team in 2014 and 2015. Kevin made Toto aware that he had a chance of an F1 drive after all – and, to Wolff’s credit, he allowed him to go for it, reassuring him that his Mercedes DTM offer would be waiting if the Renault opportunity came to naught.

He got the Renault drive. In February 2016, on the evening of the opening day of the first pre-season test, I had dinner with him at El Trabuc in Granollers, which is near Circuit de Catalunya. He was visibly excited about the year ahead and it was clear that a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. I hoped – and believed – that he would carve out a long future for himself at Renault, but the RS16 chassis was a bitter disappointment and, although he outperformed his team-mate Jolyon Palmer, things never quite gelled for him there. “They offered me a contract extension for 2017,” he remembers now, “but I’d seen Carlos’s dad [Carlos Sainz Sr] going in and out of the motorhome quite a lot, so I thought Carlos would probably join the team soon, which he did, so I reckoned that I’d have only one more year there at best.”

I remember that time very well,” I reply. “And when Guenther [Steiner] contacted you, and offered you a Haas drive, and you told him you’d consider it if he matched the money Renault had offered you, and Guenther said yes even though that constituted twice as much money as he’d offered you initially, and you WhatsApped me to tell me all of the above, I remember how I replied. ‘Get your arse in the Haas.’”

“That’s right,” says Kevin, “I remember, and I did exactly that, and I had four years at Haas then. The first two years, 2017 and 2018, were good. I scored points quite often, I made a decent amount of money with all those points bonuses, I had a quick team-mate, Romain [Grosjean], who I used to beat, and I was happy. And early in 2018 I began to drive the Ferrari in the Maranello F1 simulator, in secret, and I did that well, and the Ferrari guys began to take an interest in me. Their drivers were Seb [Vettel] and Kimi [Räikkönen], and they were eyeing up Charles [Leclerc] for 2019. He was racing for Sauber or Alfa Romeo or whatever it was called in 2018, and he started the season badly. But in Baku he raced well to sixth, then he began to score a lot of points after that, and I realised that they were going to go for him, not me.

“I’d like to race in WEC for the next 15 years and win at Le Mans”

“As regards getting my arse into a car better than a Haas, I don’t think I yet realised that my ship had sailed, but I guess it had. Also, the next two years, 2019 and 2020, were less good. Our Haas car wasn’t as competitive or as reliable as it had been before, and then they needed pay drivers for 2021, so they went for Nikita [Mazepin] and Mick [Schumacher]. I was out of F1.”

Geopolitics came to his aid, however: “Putin invaded Ukraine, and that meant that Nikita was out of a Haas drive because he was Russian, and I was back in. Finishing fifth in Bahrain in 2022 on my F1 comeback was mega. But it was really hard to get out of the 2022 WEC contract that I’d just signed for Peugeot, and I had to pay them quite a bit to walk away from it.

“Anyway, by 2024 I wasn’t enjoying Haas, or F1, any more. I didn’t like the new breed of ground-effect cars with low-profile tyres. They don’t suit my driving style, which is to carry as much speed into a corner as I can and brake as I turn in. Also I have a wife and two daughters now and, well, if you do 24 grands prix every year you’re hardly ever at home.”

Halfway through 2024 Kevin announced he would be leaving Haas at the end of year. The remainder of his time with the team was a mixed bag; promising performances dovetailed with mistakes, bad luck and even a one-race ban after an accumulation of penalty points on his superlicence. It was an unfitting end to his time in F1.

A third act begins this year, however. “I’m doing a WEC programme with BMW, plus three great IMSA races. I’ve driven at Daytona and Sebring, with Petit Le Mans [at Road Atlanta] to come. It’s perfect. Those races mean a lot to me, because I used to go to them when I was a kid, to support my dad when he was racing in them. I’d like to race in WEC for the next 15 years. Obviously, I’d love to win at Le Mans. If I did that, I think it would be every bit as good as winning in F1, which of course I never did.”

Four years ago he competed in the French classic alongside his dad. “It was cool to get the chance to drive alongside my father [and Anders Fjordbach] at Le Mans in 2021. I looked up to my dad so much as a kid, so to get the chance to compare my own driving with his in the same car at the same time on the same circuit was quite surreal. Looking through the data and comparing my laps with his, and seeing the details of our driving styles, was fascinating. I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to stand in the pitlane at Le Mans, ready for driver change, and have my dad jump out of the car that I’m about to get into.”

Next month he will line up alongside Raffaele Marciello and Dries Vanthoor in the WRT BMW team at Le Mans: “It’s the big one for all the Hypercar teams and drivers. We have a chance of winning it this year. The thing is, so do most of the Hypercar field. Everyone is so competitive that the result will be decided by the small details of how we execute the race. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more than half the field on the lead lap at the end, fighting for the win.”

He pauses, and then, to my immense joy after all the ups and downs I have witnessed him go through over the past decade, adds, “I’m really, really looking forward to it.”

Born: 05/10/1992, Roskilde, Denmark

• 2008 Moves from karting to the Danish Formula Ford Championship; wins title.
• 2009 Finishes second, behind António Félix da Costa, in Formula Renault 2.0.
• 2011 Drives for Carlin in British F3; ends the year second behind Felipe Nasr.
• 2012-13 Two years in Formula Renault 3.5 Series; seventh in ’12, champion in ’13.
• 2014-15 Moves to F1 with McLaren; finishes second on his debut; ends the season in 11th. Reserve driver in ’15.
• 2016 With Renault in F1; 16th in the standings. Best finish, seventh (Russia).
• 2017-20 Haas calls. Best season 2018, finishing ninth, with two fifth-place finishes.
• 2021 With Ganassi in the IMSA SportsCar Championship; also Le Mans 24 Hours debut alongside dad Jan.
• 2022-24 Return to Haas, but struggles for points, finishing 13th, 19th and 15th.
• 2025 Endurance racing with BMW.