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Kevin Magnussen says in a interview with Motor Sport Magazine that throughout his Formula 1 career he struggled to live up to unrealistic expectations, especially in his debut season with McLaren in 2014.
From the start he became linked to the performance he delivered in his very first Formula 1 race back in 2014, where, as a so-called rookie, he managed to reach the podium in the Australian Grand Prix. He never managed to live up to that position again in his subsequent 187 Formula 1 Grand Prix's for McLaren, Renault and Haas respectively. Magnussen today says he struggled with a massive internal pressure of expectations at British team McLaren.
Today he reveals that he felt he wasn’t treated fairly by being compared to drivers like Lewis Hamilton, who had been a partner with Jenson Button at McLaren from 2010 to 2012. “I remember Jonathan (Neale, Managing Director) and Éric (Boullier, Racing Director) telling me, ‘Lewis 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. Now I wish I’d stood up for myself. I was naïve.
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.” The Dane drove the last Formula 1 race of his career last December for Haas. Today he drives for BMW in the World Endurance Championship.
