"I BECAME DEPRESSED IN 2015, I DON'T MIND ADMITTING THAT.I LIVED TO RACE AND I WASN'T RACING™

The Danish driver, in this honest appraisal of his career, talks candidly of his difficulties in F1 and how endurance racing has reignited his love of the track

- Kevin Magnussen

Where do you start when your task is to interview a Formula 1 driver who is also a friend? To be clear, having worked in F1 for a third of a century, Iam chummy with dozens of F1 drivers past and present. But I am close friends with only a few.

“So, Kev, I begin,” sitting in my study at home in London, seeing my old mate in front ofme, ona Teams video link, driving through pretty roads in rural Denmark at the wheel of what appears not to be a supercar or anything like one, “what are you driving?”

“A Merc Sprinter van,” he replies. “I’m towing my new kart to a test session. It’s a proper gearbox kart, a quick one, and I’m going to enter the Danish Shifter Karting Championship in it.” And there you have it, ina nutshell. A 32-year-old veteran of 185 F1 grand prix starts Kevin Magnussen may be, but it is racing for its own sake that floats his boat. Yes, he loves Monte Carlo, but not for the mega-bucks or the super-yachts.

“Monaco is fantastic in a modern F1 car. Massenet and Casino Square are an awesome challenge, almost unbelievably quick,” he says. If you want to make him happy, give him something with wheels and an engine and ask him to race it as fast as it’ll go.

How about a left-field opening question. “Are you aware that you hold two Formula 1 records?” I ask him.

“No, what are they?”

“Well, the first is that you scored 18 world championship points on your grand prix debut, which is a record, because others such as Jacques Villeneuve [second in Melbourne in 1996] and Giancarlo Baghetti [first at Reims in 1961] did what they did when the points scheme was different. Oh and you're not going to like the second.”

“What is it?”

“Most grands prix started without leading a single lap. You top the list with 185. Martin Brundle is second on 158, by the way.”