The day Magnussen met Moss — F1 driver star-struck by his hero

Intra-team dynamics can be tricky in Formula 1, especially those surrounding the stars of the show. As a result, many drivers you just work with, the best you can. Others you warm to, with good results. Some you become chummy with. Very few become real friends. For me, Kevin Magnussen is a real friend.

A member of the McLaren Young Driver Development Programme when I was the Woking team’s comms chief, he raced only one season for us, 2014, the MP4-29 we gave him neither the prettiest nor the fastest of McLaren’s chrome-livery era, despite its new and competitive Mercedes-Benz V6 turbo engine. Nonetheless, in Melbourne he made one of the best debuts in Formula 1 history, qualifying fourth and finishing third on the road, later being classified second after Daniel Ricciardo was disqualified from that position for a Red Bull-Renault fuel-flow irregularity. Kevin had a good rookie season thereafter, albeit never gracing the podium again and being shaded by his very experienced world champion team-mate Jenson Button, and when we bagged a true megastar for 2015, Fernando Alonso, after a lot of internal wrangling in the end it was Magnussen who lost out. So, for 2015, he was given that unenviable job for a man who lives to race: reserve driver.

In previous eras, driver vacancies cropped up with depressing regularity, for reasons that would be morbid, and are unnecessary, to explain. In modern times, although racing remains dangerous, death is happily a much rarer occurrence. The years 2020 and 2021 aside, when Covid created a few opportunities for reserve drivers, their lot is nowadays a dreary one. They sit in engineering meetings, envious of the understeer and front locking about which their race driver colleagues complain; they do media work; they hobnob with sponsors; and, if they are the type with whom regular team members can become clubbable, they chat. So it was that Kevin and I became friends in 2015.

The next year he left us, happily, for he had bagged a race drive with Renault. I had dinner with him at El Trabuc, in Granollers, on the evening of the opening day of the first pre-season test at Circuit de Catalunya, in February 2016, and, despite his team-mate Jolyon Palmer having been slowest, he was excited about driving the Renault the next day. He ate steak and salad, washed down with fizzy water, and, now in different teams, for I was still a McLaren man, we steered our conversation away from performance-related matters that by rights we should not be discussing with each other to the history of Formula 1, which I have always loved and he loves more than any driver with whom I have ever worked, with the possible exception of Sebastian Vettel.

“Stirling Moss is my all-time hero,” said Kevin, taking a sip of Vichy Catalan. “Do you think I could get his autograph?”