The relaxed home life that helps F1’s Danish superstar to deliver

“Are you Mr Magnussen?”

Finally, after half an hour of walking along the harbour in Kevin Magnussen’s home city of Roskilde with GP Racing in tow, Denmark’s only current Formula 1 driver is stopped by a group of people wanting to pose for a picture. But they’re not local – they're French tourists here to visit sights such as Roskilde’s famous Viking Ship Museum and UNESCO-listed gothic cathedral rather than stalk one of the area’s most famous sporting sons.

‘Mr Magnussen’ confirms his identity and politely agrees to pose.

It would be easy to get the impression Kevin’s compatriots aren’t that interested in him, as if he’s simply another face on the street – the boy from next door perhaps – rather than Kevin Magnussen, F1 driver. Over the next couple of hours, as Kevin guides GP Racing around various parts of what is one of Denmark’s oldest cities, he isn’t intercepted in this manner again.

He’s definitely recognised, though. As we cross one of the harbour bridges, a guy in headphones shouts “Hey, det er virkelig dig, mand.” But he isn’t going for a selfie – a fist-bump with Kev is enough. Teenagers point out Kevin’s Porsche 911 to one another as we cross another one of the intersections in the city centre. Passers-by offer a look and a wide smile, but they simply walk on.

It’s a Scandinavian thing.

“They’re very chilled out here,” smiles Kevin, referring not just to the residents of Roskilde but to the entire nation of Denmark, a country where even their Queen can go shopping without being hassled.

Kevin has lived in Roskilde for most of his life, having grown up on the edge of the city whose population is just shy of 52,000. Like any kid from a working-class Roskilde family – except that his father Jan was an F1 driver.

“Formula 1 wasn’t as big as it is now,” says Kevin. “I think most people followed F1 in the years after, I would say – the Schumacher era. Of course, there was some attention there. But you know, when I speak to Mick [Schumacher] about the way he grew up, my childhood was totally different.

After the call from Haas earlier this year, Magnussen harboured strong desires to get back into F1

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro

“If you see where I grew up... it was normal. Do you want to go there?”

It’s agreed that we will – once we’ve completed our tour of the attractions of this fascinating city, which was the capital of Denmark for around 400 years until Copenhagen supplanted it in the 15th century. It acted as a hub for Viking sea power thanks to its position at the north end of Zealand, the large island which sits between the southern tip of Sweden and the main landmass of Denmark; to the east lies the Baltic Sea, to the west (via the Kattegat and the Skagerrak) is the North Sea, via which the Vikings sailed as far afield as North America and Constantinople.

"That was the end of it: if [dad] was earning less than what my season cost, that doesn’t go. That’s why I needed to get a job" Kevin Magnussen

“It’s amazing to think that they just took off, you know, went north here,” Magnussen points towards the Roskilde Fjord, which feeds into the Kattegat, “and then west and ‘see what happens’. A couple of boys down [in the boat] and, ‘Off we go!’

“I have a friend who stole one of the ships once, went sailing with it and brought it back,” he laughs as we climb aboard one of the vessels.

Magnussen’s closest friends are the ones he made here while growing up. “Very normal,” he describes them. “They’re carpenters, plumbers... I have a group of friends that go back, you know, some of them 25 years.”

From racing to welding – and back again

There was every chance of Kevin taking a normal job like those of his friends. His racing career almost stalled in 2008 and, at 15 years old, he spent three months learning to be a welder.

“My dad [a one-time McLaren and Stewart GP driver] ran out of money to pay for my karting,” Magnussen recalls. “We had an opportunity to go and race in the Danish Formula Ford championship, but usually that doesn’t take you anywhere. So, that looked likely to be the end of my motorsport adventure. And then my uncle – he was a welder – just picked me up from home one day and was like, ‘We need to get you a job, because you never know what’s gonna happen with this racing thing.’”

Kevin's father Jan did a season and a half in F1 with Stewart

Photo by: Sutton Images

Kevin’s dad wasn’t in Formula 1 long enough to carve a niche or make serious money. Jan Magnussen spent two years as McLaren’s test driver, making only one race start, then spent 18 months at Stewart before being dropped in favour of Max Verstappen’s father, Jos. While Jan went on to have a successful career in endurance racing, it wasn’t lucrative enough to bankroll a single-seater career for his son.

“What you don’t realise is a lot of drivers in F1 don’t make a lot of money,” says Kevin. “Some of them come with funding and get a big chunk of it as well. But there are also these drivers that get to F1 without money – and they don’t get a big salary. They will be on, let’s say, $250,000 or half a million a year max. And then you’ve also got to live and pay tax and... you know, you also are a bit of a star, so you spend a lot of money suddenly. At least that was my dad’s case.

“If you have to fund your son’s racing adventures, you run out of money very easily. So that was the end of it: if he was earning less than what my season cost, that doesn’t go. That’s why I needed to get a job.”

It was one of Denmark’s richest men, motorsport enthusiast Karsten Ree, who then helped the Magnussens really get Kevin’s single-seater career off the ground.

“I went to the welding factory,” says Kevin. “I was there for three months. But I also did this Formula Ford championship and I won it, and my dad was racing in Danish Touring Cars and he also won his championship. And the owner of his team was pretty wealthy.

“After the season was finished, they had this dinner with the team at the track, in the tent, and my dad had to do the speech to thank the sponsors and the mechanics and all that, and I was asked to come up and talk about my season as well – we were the support race that weekend. And Karsten, the wealthy guy, was there too. So, I thanked everyone and I talked about my season, and then Karsten finished off to thank everyone as well. And at the end, he just said: ‘Аnd by the way, I’ve decided to fund Kevin’s career all the way to Formula 1'.

“That was the first I heard of it! I didn’t even know if anything was going on at all. And he just said it. I looked at my dad, I was like, ‘What did he say? He...he, what?’ I was welding and I thought maybe it was the end. And then suddenly, boom, I had all the money I needed to go racing.”

Roskilde: home of Danish motorsport?

Roskilde isn’t just famous for Vikings and the annual music festival which has hosted acts as diverse as Bob Marley, David Bowie, Prince, Nirvana, Pet Shop Boys, Kanye West and Slipknot. It’s also a Danish motorsport capital of sorts, and not only because both the Magnussens were born here.

Built in 1955, the 670-metre (later extended to just under a mile) Roskilde Ring looped around a former gravel pit close to the city centre, and a stone’s throw away from Roskilde cathedral, the chosen burial site of Danish monarchs for the past 600 years.

Magnussen has moved out of Denmark twice before - but it looks unlikely he'll do it again

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro

“The track isn’t there anymore, but they had Formula 3, Formula 2, sportscars, all this stuff,” says Kevin of a venue which also hosted non-championship Formula 1 Danish Grands Prix between 1960 and 1962.

“Stirling Moss raced here and I talked to him about these races. I went to his home once, in Mayfair, and he was showing me all these scrapbooks of newspapers from all the places he’d raced at. And then he pulled out a book, this thick,” Kevin spreads his thumb and index finger apart, “full of newspapers from Denmark, because he’s been here so many times and did all these races. It was so cool.

“So there’s a lot of racing history here. I guess, if there’s one place in Denmark that is about racing, it’s Roskilde.”

Neither Kevin nor his dad got to race at the Roskilde Ring, since it was demolished in 1969, a victim of noise complaints from local residents. While the Magnussen family had prior involvement in the automotive world, Jan’s generation was the first to break into motorsport.

"I got promised some things and then it didn’t happen and I was left with nothing. I was super-depressed, stressed, I had no money and didn’t know what I was gonna do. That whole year [2015] was just shit" Kevin Magnussen

“My granddad was a mechanic,” says Kevin. “He was working at the local police station here, servicing the police cars. And he always had motorbikes around and stuff like that. Then my uncle started motocross, and karting too, when my dad was 10. They did it together.

“So they were racing around Denmark and then – in their first race outside of Denmark – they decided, ‘Let’s go and try world championship’ in Formula K or whatever formula it was back then. And then he [Jan] won, and became world champion.”

A tale of two hiatuses

Kevin has moved out of Denmark twice and returned twice – both times after losing his seat in Formula 1.

He first left Roskilde at the age of 17. The greetings card he’d received from McLaren boss Ron Dennis on his second birthday – as the son of Dennis’s test driver at the time – helped Magnussen establish contact with McLaren and eventually join its junior programme, which led him to move to Woking in 2010.

Five years on, having made it to F1 but then been dropped (in favour of Fernando Alonso) after one season with McLaren, he returned to Roskilde.

Making it to F1 with McLaren, like his father, Magnussen was dropped from the British squad

Photo by: Patrik Lundin / Motorsport Images

In his book, which came out last year, Kevin describes that period as one of the lowest points of his life. He wasn’t racing, for the first time in a long time, but was still attending grands prix as a reserve driver. The disappointment of losing his drive hit him so badly that on grand prix weekend evenings Kevin led a lifestyle hardly appropriate for an elite sportsman – in April of that year, after a night out at a Shanghai nightclub, he woke up in his hotel with his nose broken and no recollection of how it had happened.

“I suffered a lot that year because I wanted to drive,” he recalls, “and, you know, I was still there watching these guys driving what I thought was my car. I felt terrible about that.

“I didn’t know if I was going to come back... I got promised some things and then it didn’t happen and I was left with nothing. I was super-depressed, stressed, I had no money and didn’t know what I was gonna do. That whole year was just shit.”

His second exit from F1 was a lot different. He’d re-entered via Renault, then in its first season after reacquiring ‘Team Enstone’. It was a heavily politicised environment, burdened by overly optimistic ambitions and a carry-over car which handled as if it had a hinge in the middle. Moving to Haas, Kevin found a team which suited his laid-back, apolitical style but, in 2019, matters came to a head as the team struggled with development and Magnussen repeatedly clashed with team-mate Romain Grosjean on track. At the end of 2020, team boss Guenther Steiner opted for a total reset and got rid of both drivers.

“I just accepted it way better,” says Kevin. “Also I felt like I’d achieved something by just getting to F1.

“I actually did enjoy that year. And I also thought, ‘OK, I’ve had this many years in Formula 1 and I’m OK with it. I’m going to have a new plan, I can go and do some other racing, have fun doing Le Mans with my dad.’ I was looking forward to a lot of things and it wasn’t so sad at all. Also my wife was pregnant, so I was really looking forward to a nice time with a family, moving back to Denmark.

“Guenther is very honest. Good or bad, you know you can trust him. I’ll never forget that, when he told me that they didn’t have a seat for me after 2020, he was so open and honest about the whole situation. There was no bullshit. He just explained it.”

"No bullshit" - Magnussen has praised Haas boss Steiner's honesty

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“[At other teams] It was always like saying one thing to you and then actually acting completely different. You know, in the Renault days they were saying, ‘No, no problems’ and everything, and I could just see other drivers’ agents and dads were walking in and out of the team [hospitality]. It’s like... ‘Eh? I know what’s going on here, so why don’t you just tell me? So I can go and make other plans.’”

During Kevin’s F1-less 2021 he raced in the US for Chip Ganassi in IMSA, had one IndyCar race and finally joined his dad to race together in the Le Mans 24 Hours. Having signed a factory endurance driver contract with Peugeot, he had his future secured. Then, at the end of February of this year, came the call from his old Haas F1 boss Steiner.

“Prior to the call [from Steiner], I had no idea I would be on the list for this seat. I knew the reasons behind why I lost the seat in the first place. But he just asked me and I said, ‘Yes, of course.’”

"Very importantly, I would like my daughter to have a more steady childhood, growing up in the same place, the same house. For her to have family around, go to the same school" Kevin Magnussen

The truth is he was ready to come back. Though he’d accepted his departure from F1, its lure was too strong. Racing elsewhere, even winning, wasn’t quite so fulfilling.

“I really changed my views in the season I had out of Formula 1. I won races again when racing in the States and it didn’t... you know, although I won, it still just wasn’t F1. I didn’t feel as ecstatic as I hoped. Just because it wasn’t Formula 1.”

Back for good

Kevin parks his Porsche next to one of the two-storey terraced houses on Knolden Street. It’s the last stop of our Roskilde tour.

“It’s always weird to go back...” he says as we walk towards the house where Kevin lived with his mother until his late teens. Jan was 18 and still racing in Formula Ford when Kevin was born. The relationship with Kevin’s mother, Britt Petersen, didn’t last.

“Here, in the bottom,” Kevin points towards the door marked ‘65A’ under a blue staircase. “It’s one bedroom. My mom lived in the living room, so I had my own room. So, pretty normal, huh?”

Magnussen perches next to GP Racing's own Oleg Karpov

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro

Kevin is almost 30 now. His 911 has a baby seat. He may be back in Formula 1, but this time he’s not interested in leaving Denmark. Financial matters might have prompted him to settle elsewhere in the past but he didn’t like it; a year in Dubai was more than enough.

“It was shit,” he says. “Too hot, but also just fake. All the culture that was there has gone. It’s just the Brits and Russians going crazy, getting super drunk.”

He lived in the UK with his wife Louise for much of his first Haas stint, but then they moved back to Denmark when they were expecting their daughter Laura. They live in Copenhagen now – still in an apartment, but one a bit bigger than the one on Knolden Street.

“I still have my own bedroom,” laughs Kevin.

Financially, his F1 career has turned out more successful than his father’s. And he’s a much bigger star in his country, too – but with Denmark being Denmark, he can still live a relatively normal life.

“There’s a lot of reasons you would move away from Denmark,” Kevin says. “It’s high tax here, there’s no secret. But I just really like Denmark, I feel at home here.

“And also, very, very importantly, I would like my daughter to have a more steady childhood, growing up in the same place, the same house. For her to have family around, go to the same school. If we’d lived in London, then my wife and kid would be alone, without any of our family there.”

Just as the Vikings who sailed from this area set out as raiders but eventually became settlers, Kevin Magnussen has been involved in a few battles in his time – but he understands the value of home.

A series of homecomings for Magnussen in 2022: a return to Haas and a return to his childhood home

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro