Formula 1's forgotten man

Kevin Magnussen's hard-luck story is yet more proof of how cruel and unforgiving the world of Formula 1 can be sometimes.

A driver who outqualified a world champion team-mate and finished on the podium on his grand prix debut finds himself 15 months later without a race seat, clinging to the flimsy promise of an uncertain F1 future.

Sure, McLaren-Honda has retained Magnussen as its reserve driver, but that is of little consolation when your entire career thus far is built on driving, racing and winning.

The young Dane must sometimes feel as though fate is against him. McLaren's decision to choose Jenson Button to partner Fernando Alonso for this season came too late for Magnussen to realistically find a competitive alternative race drive (with Honda affiliation of course) in another category - to compliment his F1-reserve duties.

And when the opportunity to race for (Honda-powered) Andretti Autosport in IndyCar came up on the eve of this campaign, Magnussen had to forego the chance in order to fulfil his primary obligation and deputise for the injured Alonso at the Australian Grand Prix.

Having outpaced Button in a difficult car in final practice, an engine problem hampered Magnussen's qualifying effort, and he didn't even get to take the start of the race thanks to his car failing on its out-lap to the grid...

Magnussen's car failed to make it as far as the grid when he got to drive in Australia... © LAT

While he was wasting his time in Melbourne the Andretti ship sailed, then Alonso returned to action for the next grand prix (in Malaysia), and now Magnussen sits on the sidelines once more.

He has nothing to show for his sole F1 outing this year (though his seat-warming exercise was more than most reserves generally get - as 2012 GP2 champion Davide Valsecchi knows all too well), so all Magnussen can do currently is don his McLaren-Honda team gear and sit and brood on what went wrong last year, while he waits patiently for the next opportunity to come along.

"It's easier to say what I did wrong, because that's what I think about," Magnussen tells AUTOSPORT, as we discuss the positives and negatives of a rookie season that ultimately wasn't quite enough to keep him on the grid full-time this year.

"Especially towards the end of the season I just really felt the pressure. Halfway through the season I knew it was going to be me or Jenson who was going to get the gig, so that's tough, especially when you've just arrived.

"It's no secret at all that I was really struggling with it - overdoing everything, over-thinking everything; I couldn't just relax and go with my instincts.

"I lost a bit of confidence. It's an experience I won't forget, and perhaps when I come back that will make me stronger."

It's the sort of positive mental attitude a driver in Magnussen's position needs in order to nurture the one thing keeping his F1 dreams afloat at the moment: hope.

To be fair to McLaren, by retaining both Button, 35, and Magnussen, 22, in different roles the team has made the best decision for both its short- and long-term interests. Button (whose F1 career is reaching its twilight) was objectively better than Magnussen last year - slightly ahead overall in qualifying (though McLaren's own analysis suggests Magnussen actually had a small advantage on raw pace) and comfortably clear in the championship.

...12 months after reaching the podium on his debut © XPB

"In terms of points it was a pretty bad season, but it was annoying because every time I had a good race I got a penalty or something, and when I was good compared with Jenson we weren't strong as a team, so we didn't score any points," Magnussen contends.

"It just always worked out that whatever I did I didn't get any points! But I also made some mistakes where I shouldn't have made mistakes, and I take blame for the penalties I got. And the deficit to Jenson was quite big there because I lost points and he gained them. Compared with him it didn't look very good that I had so few."

Magnussen actually made a very strong start to his rookie season (which buys you an awful lot of credibility in this cut-throat world), but ultimately his lack of experience at this level told. He struggled to manage the delicate Pirelli tyres effectively in races, while Button's ability to hone the car's set-up and perform at his canny best on Sundays - especially in the latter part of the season - cast Magnussen into the shade. It's a lesson the Dane has taken onboard while he awaits his second chance.

"There's some driving style in it and managing on-track, but a lot of it is how you set up the car and how you prepare for the race," he explains, when asked about the deficit to his team-mate last year. "I just didn't have the experience, and what I did wrong was try to out-do Jenson and try something different, whereas I should have just tried to learn [from him].

"Towards the end I just focused on trying to beat Jenson, which wasn't the right approach. You have to focus on yourself and not someone else. You need to switch off and do your own thing.

"In the beginning I had no expectations, so just went out and did what I normally did, and it worked. Towards the end I started over-thinking. I'll learn from that."

Magnussen also learned just how good his team-mate really is last year. Not many put the 2009 world champion in the bracket of absolute grandee F1 drivers, but Magnussen reckons Button doesn't get enough credit for his skills behind the wheel.

In Button, Magnussen had a team-mate who was difficult to beat © LAT

"I think maybe he fits really well with this formula - how it is at the moment - and he's so much better than I thought," Magnussen says. "I've said it before, I think he's underrated and doesn't get the credit he deserves - at least for his outright speed.

"Many people know he's very clever and calculating, but they don't seem to think he's one of the quickest guys, which I really think he is. Fernando is probably one of the quickest and there's not a big difference [between them].

"Jenson is my only reference, but it will take a long time to get the sort of intuition and reaction that he has for things, like pitting at the right time when there's a safety car, or bad weather, or something like that, because he's so quick to react and take the right decision - because he has good experience and he's really talented.

"He makes the right choice because he's done it so many times and he's so intelligent. It's the same with knowing when to push the tyres and also what direction to go in with set-up.

"You can easily look average [against Jenson]. If me and Jenson had the winning car [in 2014] it would have looked great - like Lewis and Nico - and no one would have questioned anything.

"But that's Formula 1. When things aren't going great you look at everything. The drivers take a lot of the credit when they win, and they also take a lot of the blame when they don't win. That's how it is."

Once it signed Alonso up for 2015 McLaren agonised over whether it should retain Magnussen as a race driver based on his raw speed and ultimate potential. It's a decision that split opinion at the highest levels of the team, and there is certainly a belief among McLaren's top brass that Magnussen should return to the grid in the future.

McLaren chairman Ron Dennis recently flew with Magnussen to Kevin's native Denmark on a private jet, before urging the country to get behind its new star and back his return to a race seat.

Both Dennis and Boullier believe in Magnussen's ability © LAT

Given McLaren's ongoing fruitless search for a new title sponsor that's perhaps no surprise, but Dennis is understood to also be personally very keen on seeing Magnussen racing in F1 again.

Certainly those who have worked with the 2013 Formula Renault 3.5 champion believe he has all the necessary ingredients to thrive if he gets another shot at the big time.

"Kevin just needs experience and more time in the car," explains McLaren racing director Eric Boullier. "It's like going from League One football to a top club - all the players are highly trained and used to the level of racing we have. Formula 1 is so much more complicated than any other category. It was a massive learning curve for him in a top team.

"What he's been doing in the junior categories is amazing, and when he won the World Series by Renault championship he did it in a manner where you could see he's a champion.

"That's the first thing. The second part is his ability to understand F1 and gather people around him, and his raw pace. He did a very good job, against a notorious team-mate.

"He has the capabilities to be a world champion of the future."

The big question, of course, is whether Magnussen will ever get the chance to make use of those capabilities.

You could argue he has had his chance, and has simply paid the price for not being quite good enough in the moment. High stakes and massive pressure is what elite sport is all about, after all, and those who chase the biggest prize in motorsport must be able to deal with that.

But that contention ignores the extreme difficulty of Magnussen's particular case. Beating one of the most experienced drivers on the grid, with a world championship to his name, and four prior seasons with the team to fall back on, was always going to be among the tallest of orders for an F1 rookie in these days of limited testing.

McLaren clearly recognises the nature of that challenge, and the quality of Magnussen's effort in attempting to rise to it.

But for now, the waiting game continues for a driver who does not deserve to join the scrapheap of talents that Formula 1 frequently forgets and leaves behind.

But there are many of those, and their litany of hard-luck stories is legion...