- Kevin Magnussen is back in Formula 1 on a multi-year deal with the Haas F1 Team he still regards as home.
- Magnussen started 79 of his 119 Formula 1 races for Haas, but he was dropped after 2020 when the team was forced into chasing finance over pure talent.
- By Wednesday, Magnussen was in Bahrain, location for this week’s three-day test, to reconvene with his old mechanics, ahead of his first planned run in the VF-22 on Friday.
A week ago, Kevin Magnussen was in Miami for a brief vacation with his young family ahead of the Sebring 12 Hours. Now, he’s back in Formula 1 on a multi-year deal with the Haas F1 Team he still regards as home.
Once it became clear to Haas, that the team could not continue its partnership with Russian driver and sponsso Nikita Mazepin and Uralkali following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it turned to a familiar face.
Magnussen started 79 of his 119 Formula 1 races for Haas, but he was dropped after 2020 when the team was forced into chasing finance over pure talent.
Magnussen spent the past year in other categories, most notably the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, and also had an outing in IndyCar and ran the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Off-track he became a father in early 2021 and moved back to his native Denmark. For 2022, he was signed with Chip Ganassi Racing for another season of sports cars and also had a contract with Peugeot for its impending World Endurance Championship project.
Life wasn’t exactly terrible.
Then Guenther Steiner’s name flashed up on Magnussen’s phone.
“It was a big surprise, and I felt really excited when he called me and asked if I wanted to come back,” Magnussen said. “I could feel in my stomach I wanted to do it; I didn’t know I missed it (F1) that much.”
Steiner had several driver managers reach out to inquire about the open seat, but Haas had quickly installed known quantity Magnussen as his preferred choice. Steiner said the team did not contact any other drivers.
“Basically, when what happened happened and we parted company with Nikita, I was discussing with Gene (Haas) who to put in the car, who’s available, the same old story, ups and downs and lefts and rights,” Steiner said. “Kevin’s name came up, and Gene said ‘do you think Kevin would come back?’ And I said ‘I have no idea, I mean, I don’t know, but I can call him up’, and I called him up. He said, ‘yeah, I’m interested’, and from there we went. No big lawyers involved or nothing. And we got going.
“Gene owns this team, he’s responsible for it financially and he can make decisions. That’s the good thing in a team like this, I can sit with Gene and whatever he wants to do, that’s what we’re going to do. We discuss it and we try to do the best. And he realized to keep on going forward again, we need to do something like this, and that is why this choice was taken.”
Haas F1 driver Kevin Magnussen, right, is back in the fold.
Mark Sutton
Magnussen was granted his release from contracts with Ganassi and Peugeot. and he finalized terms with Haas on a multi-year deal as it “wouldn’t have made sense to come back for just one year.”
That was also what Haas wanted, so it was a swift and easy process.
“It didn’t feel like the team really wanted to let me go last time and it just felt like coming home this time,” Magnussen said. “I’m super chuffed with that. Life is full of surprises and this is certainly one of the big ones.”
By Wednesday, Magnussen was in Bahrain, location for this week’s three-day test, to reconvene with his old mechanics, ahead of his first planned run in the VF-22 on Friday.
“Walking into the paddock I felt I’d never left, it’s funny, when I think about the year—I had a kid, I moved back to Denmark—it feels like 10 years passed, then I walked back in and it felt like I never left.”
The rekindling of the Magnussen/Haas connection comes as a feel-good story for both parties. After a promising 2017, the relationship blossomed in 2018 with 56 points and ninth in the standings for Magnussen, as Haas classified fifth in the teams’ battle. But Haas took a downward spiral in 2019 that continued through 2020, a season in which Magnussen scored just one point. Out went Magnussen, who could not bring sufficient funding, while Haas’ slump continued in 2021.
“I think it was tough mentally to accept that ‘okay that’s it, everything, this dream you’ve been working towards ever since you were a little kid, is now a closed chapter’, you have to deal with it,” said Magnussen .
He’d already had a second chance in F1, after being benched from the 2015 season, so doubted he’d get another shot after his initial Haas departure.
“I thought that whole chapter was closed. That made me really sad.”
“One of the ways I dealt with it was to think how lucky I was to get the chance in the first place,” he said. “I thought that whole chapter was closed. That made me really sad. But then if I thought about how lucky I was to get that opportunity to have done seven years in F1 and get those races and experiences. That made me really happy about what I had achieved, it made me feel privileged to have done what I have done.”
Nevertheless, Magnussen had appeared slightly disillusioned with Formula 1 by the end of 2020. So why, 15 months later, is he back with the same team, one that failed to take a point in his absence?
“The reason I think I lost motivation after 2020 is we’d been running pretty much at the back of the grid for two years, and I wanted more,” Magnussen said. “I felt like I was getting better and better as a driver but the results weren’t really coming. Even though it’s Formula 1 it does get too frustrating if you’re running around at the back and not making progress in any job.
“The fact we’ve got this new car, starting from a blank sheet of paper for everyone, was also crucial for my decision to come back. It’s exciting, an element of unknown, there could be surprises.
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“I thought that opportunity was too good to let down and also thought about the fact I’m still only 29 years old, so there’s not a lot of reasons to not take this opportunity, especially given how I felt when Guenther called me, I what so happy!”
It is undoubtedly a fillip for Haas after a difficult phase, while handily Magnussen will provide a stronger benchmark to gauge the true talent of Ferrari-backed youngster Mick Schumacher, entering year two.
“Kevin is young, but he has done six seasons in F1, it will help Mick as well that he gets a reference, and that helps Mick grow as well,” said Steiner. “When I told Mick ‘Kevin is coming’ he was happy about it as he knows he can learn something from it.”
At the end of a tumultuous week for Haas—one in which its test running was compromised by late freight caused by a plane going technical—it can finally start to breathe.
“Kevin was here for four years, he’s a very down to earth guy, he knows the guys not to be nice with them just to be nice, he actually likes them,” Steiner says. “We all know how Kevin came to Formula 1, the hard way, so he respects everybody working there and the guys enjoy him as a human being, not only as a driver. Obviously they were very happy. Everybody thinks this was the right thing to do.”
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