Magnussen confirms why he was dumped

Kevin Magnussen lost his McLaren seat after the 2014 season, a single rookie season, despite an impressive debut against his far more experienced team-mate, the 2009 Drivers Champion Jenson Button. The Dane is certain that he was the victim of a power struggle at the top.

At the 2014 season opener in Melbourne, Magnussen secured himself a place on the podium – and rightly earned a lot of applause for it. The youngster made it eleven more times into the points and finished the season with 55 points overall. 

K Magnussen & J Button

 

His much more experienced team-mate Jenson Button ended his season with 126 points, more than twice as many as Magnussen, finishing eighth in the standings. The paddock and F1 fans generally accepted that Kevin Magnussen had done a good job for a debut in a particularly uncompetitive car. Despite this, the Dane was royally dumped by McLaren at the end of the season, famously by text from former team boss Ron Dennis, on Kevin’s birthday.

Ultimately, the rookie lost his cockpit to Fernando Alonso, whose commitment to move from Ferrari to McLaren was communicated early within the team before the press knew anything.

“Jenson and I already knew at Spa that Alonso was signed and one of us would have to leave. That’s when the team-internal fight became really intense.” recalls Magnussen on the official F1 podcast published today.

“The team was enthusiastic about me and supported me enormously, Eric Boullier and the rest of the team gave me a feeling of security,” he says, revealing that “Jenson had already prepared a farewell helmet for his last race. He really expected to have to leave and I thought I would stay.”

For that reason, Magnussen didn’t negotiate with other teams, but he would soon regret it. Because when the board voted on who should drive alongside Alonso in 2015, there were seven members for Magnussen and only two for Button.

 

However, both Mansour Ojjeh and the representatives of the Mumtalakat investment fund of the Bahrain royal family wanted the 2009 World Champion, while Ron Dennis aimed to keep on the younger of the two.

“I don’t know why it went this way. I think they just wanted to wipe Ron out,” Magnussen suspects. “And whatever Ron would have wanted to do, they would have fought back,” 

“He [Button] is a very nice, funny and charismatic guy, but he is also a merciless fighter and very intelligent. So he’s not just a teammate, especially for a rookie like me. I felt like I was faster, but he had more experience and knew how to use it well. I learned a lot from him.”

And Kevin also revealed: “Jenson was very close to both the Bahraini and Mansour and he also did a great job there and was with the right people. He did what he had to do – I think I learned my lesson in this respect as well.”

Magnussen was retained by McLaren in 2015 as reserve driver, who actually raced in Alonso’s seat for Melbourne following the bizarre crash in Jerez testing. The Dane then joined Renault for 2016, eventually going to HAAS in 2017 to the present day.

 

2014 F1 Pre Season Test 1 – Day 4
Circuito de Jerez, Jerez, Spain.

 

 

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4 responses to “Magnussen confirms why he was dumped

  1. Pingback: Rich Energy twitter hacked? PR stunt? - thejudge13·

  2. It’s standard practice in journalism, and common decency, to quote the source of ones material

    This is just regurgitating soneone elses work… namely that of Tom Clarkson and the Beyond The Grid podcast

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