Jan Magnussen: Too much too young

Things have changed now, but during his early career Magnussen had a distinctly maverick approach to being a racing driver. He smoked, made no secret of his distaste for going to the gym and paid little heed to commercial niceties.

The stories are legion, among them an occasion during his F1 career when he was in the Czech Republic to promote the Ford Ka, which he had driven to a press conference. The inevitable first question was what he thought of the new model. “It’s one of the worst cars I’ve ever driven,” came the honest, if somewhat ill-advised, answer.

The problem — although it hardly seemed like one at the time — was that he was just too damn talented. He did not have to try — he just got into a car and blew everybody away. While other drivers hustled hard off track to keep their careers going, Magnussen’s natural ability meant opportunities came to him.

His F3 performances won him a test contract with McLaren, but he got very few F1 miles while spending two up-and-down years in the DTM with Mercedes in 1995 and ’96. By now Magnussen’s unconventional approach was beginning to cause him problems — people said he was unfit, that he did not work hard enough out of the car.

“The thing I remember about Jan,” says McLaren principal Ron Dennis, “was that he never seemed to know why he wasn’t quick, and he was the most disorganised grand prix driver I’ve ever known.

“I remember once we were at an airport. Jan had packed his passport into his suitcase and when he opened the suitcase to find it, it looked like it had been packed by a four-year-old. It looked like he’d gone round the room and just thrown everything into it — including the dirty washing. And none of his toiletries were in a bag.

“People like that are chaotic in their thinking. I thought, ‘There’s no way he’s going to make it.”

Even so, Magnussen made a highly accomplished F1 debut at the 1995 Pacific Grand Prix at Aïda in Japan. Before the race he had never done more than four consecutive laps in a McLaren. But, filling in at the last minute for a sick Mika Häkkinen, he finished 10th, right behind team-mate Mark Blundell.

“I caught him with a few laps to go,” Magnussen recalls. “I should have had a go at him. Ron commented on it after the race, but I would have had to take a chance and it was important for me to show I could be sensible. In any other situation I would have found a way, but we weren’t near the points, he was my team-mate and I didn’t want to take him off, and it was my first race and it was very important for me to finish. Everyone was on at me about not being fit. And I just wanted to show everyone that I was fit.”

Jackie and Paul Stewart always intended to employ Magnussen when they founded their grand prix team in 1997, but neither they nor he realised that his performance in Aïda disguised the fact that he was seriously ill-equipped for a full-time drive with a novice F1 team.

Magnussen, by his own admission, was “young and naïve” and not prepared mentally for F1. He had not yet realised that talent alone is not enough, nor that he lacked the experience to cope with the technical complexities of a grand prix car. Having signed a four-year contract, he neither realised how vulnerable his position could be, nor how important it was to demand the changes he wanted.

Operationally, Stewart was a long way from being a top F1 team, and pre-season testing was a disaster. Barrichello, Magnussen’s team-mate, had five years of F1 experience to fall back on. Magnussen did not.

Le Fleming: “At the end of ’97 he was pretty chuffed with the way the season had finished. He was fired up, saying he was going to work on his fitness because he had privately acknowledged that he didn’t work on it enough. He said, ‘You won’t recognise me next year.’ I thought, ‘That’s what we want.’

“But the ’98 car was a complete shitbox, and when you’ve got a bad car it is the young, inexperienced guys that suffer. He was expecting to go straight into a car that was half-decent like at the end of the previous year and it was actually a step backwards and harder to drive.

“It was the first year of grooved tyres as well and there were so many factors that were different and he couldn’t pinpoint where they came from, whether it was the tyres or the car or whatever. I mean, Rubens was struggling and he had a lot of experience to fall back on and he’d done most of the winter testing as well.

“I don’t think what happened to Jan was Jan’s fault. We all hoped for a better second year and we all wanted Jan to continue. It’s unfair that he was sacked that year because the way that car was I don’t think you could ever blame any of the drivers for not being able to drive it properly. Jos (Verstappen, who replaced Magnussen) didn’t do any better so there you go.”

When I read this analysis to Magnussen he was silent for a moment, before saying in a quiet voice: “That’s the first time I’ve heard anything like that from someone at Stewart. It’s a little bit hard for me to remember, but I think it was the same sort of pattern — not enough testing, and I remember getting lost. You know, ‘Where is the problem?”

The decision to sack Magnussen hit him hard — at 24 his life’s dream was over. “I went back to Denmark and was ready to pack it all in,” he says. “I was disappointed in myself, but also with people in F1. I thought about quitting. Then David Sears (Magnussen’s manager) called me about testing in the US with Panoz.

“It wasn’t something I really wanted to do but it was such a weird, wonderful car. I felt a good sense of team spirit; good people around me. I felt that people wanted me there. I wasn’t just somebody they could f*** later on.”

At Panoz he rebuilt his career as one of the world’s best sportscar drivers. He and team-mate David Brabham beat the all-conquering Audis five times in three years — the only times the German cars ever lost in that period. Last year he won his class at Le Mans in a Chevrolet Corvette. He’s driving for Chevy again in ’05, alongside a Toyota deal in the Danish Touring Car series, which he won in 2003 for Peugeot.

“I didn’t understand until I began working with Panoz that I was so unhappy in F1,” Magnussen says. “I realised how much I enjoyed racing, and how little I enjoyed all the bullshit of F1. So I didn’t try at all to come back to F1. That’s not to say I wouldn’t try it again.

“I really wanted to be successful, but I didn’t know what I had to do to be successful. I’ve learnt that since then. But the more l thought about it the more I realised it wasn’t only me. It was many things around me.”

No one who has worked with Magnussen doubts he had the talent to become an F1 ace. Maybe he would have made it if he had come to it a little older and wiser — done some time in Indycars, say, like Montoya. For Le Fleming, though, it might not even have taken that.

“He’s definitely a quick guy, and if you had somebody who was hard enough to beat him up about working at it then I think he could have done well. If somehow Jan had got a Williams drive in ’97 or something, I think he’d be a bloody star.”