An "incredible" Kevin Magnussen wasted no time in showing the IMSA SportsCar Championship and Daytona 24 Hours field that although his Formula 1 career has (likely) come to an end, he's still taking top-level motorsport very seriously.
He'd had just one test and some simulator time before this year's traditional circuit racing curtain-raiser in Florida, so expectations were low - but Magnussen was a crucial part of the #24 BMW M V8 Hybrid's bid for victory, which eventually came up just short of a podium in fourth.
Magnussen's performance made the team feel like he's been there for years.
Part of a victory bid
Yes, it helps that Magnussen has done the Daytona 24 Hours twice before (and might've won but for a puncture on his first attempt in 2021) - but it was his first time there with an LMDh car and he hadn't had an acceptable amount of testing to be on par with his peers.
"I signed with BMW fairly early, so I would have had time to get into it earlier if I hadn't been busy with F1," he reflected after his first spell in the car.
"So I only sort of made that switch after new year. I had to learn everything very quickly, and I'm still learning as I went now, in the stints."
Philipp Eng, Raffaele Marciello and polesitter Dries Vanthoor are all massively respected and well-established sportscar stars, and Magnussen absolutely did not look out of place as their team-mate.
In his first stints starting three hours into the race, he was immediately thrown in at the deep end thanks to low temperatures making the track like ice on fresh tyres (with no tyre blankets in IMSA) - and also faced with the need to run double stints on rubber to save fresh sets for late in the race when the result would be decided.
The #24 car had before that escaped into the distance from pole in Vanthoor's hands, setting a fastest lap which stood for over 600 tours before it was beaten. But then Vanthoor misjudged his pit entry and cost the team valuable time. It’s a “s**t stint when you end like that”, he lamented despite the obvious speed.
Once in the car, at one stage Magnussen dropped a lap down shortly after a pitstop, but he didn’t panic, chased down the leader to return to the lead lap and worked his way back up, running as high as third, then finally handing the car over in fourth position.
He was also tasked with doing a near two-hour stint in the night, something he hasn’t done properly since his last endurance race in 2022. It didn't help that, as BMW had worked out by the race, its car was much better suited to warmer conditions - so while its Porsche rivals dominated the stone-cold darkness hours, Magnussen and his team-mates just had to stay in the conversation.
Perhaps Magnussen’s best and most impressive stint was his last, not long after the sun had risen on Sunday morning. He took over just before 8am local, giving the car back just after 9am with just over four hours to go.
First Magnussen made the most of a mistake by Matt Campbell locking up the #6 Porsche at Turn 2 to jump into second inside the 21st hour. Mathieu Jaminet took over the Porsche after a set of stops - setting up a demon move at Turn 2 to reclaim the position.
Magnussen held on around the outside of the hairpin-like corner and had his wheel ahead approaching the left kink, but showed a massive deal of maturity to back out and allow Jaminet through, keeping both in the race.
After his first spell in the car, Magnussen had discussed his progress, and the sensibility of allowing Jaminet to pass showed he had taken his own advice from earlier.
“I think people get quite excited to start racing early,” Magnussen said.
“I get sucked into it as well. I just have to stay calm and stay out of these crazy fights, because sometimes it gets a bit hairy, and there's no reason for it.”
What does stint analysis tell us?
It’s very tricky in sportscar racing to analyse a driver’s laptimes against other drivers in their own car, team-mates in a sister car, and other drivers on track. Drivers often run two or three stints and conditions can be drastically different by the time the car is swapped over. Comparing with other drivers is tough with such a range of tyre and fuel strategies, plus, traffic is a massive part of sportscar racing and it can really skew the data.
It doesn’t mean it’s a pointless task, but it does make your eyes wander to other data points to try and paint a clearer picture.
In a 24-hour race, one very simply stat I like to look at is drive time. Fundamentally, a team wouldn’t put a driver it didn’t feel was performing well behind the wheel for long periods.
#24 time behind the wheel
Dries Vanthoor - 7h18m
Philipp Eng - 6h50m
Kevin Magnussen - 6h20m
Raffaele Marciello - 3h12m
Given Magnussen’s lack of testing or experience in the car, and that Eng did IMSA with the team last year and Vanthoor was one of its most trusted World Endurance stars, that Magnussen was even close on drive time feels really significant.
If we do peek at the laptimes, they also reflect well on Magnussen.
BMW best laptimes
Sheldon van der Linde 1m35.868s
Dries Vanthoor 1m35.977s
Kevin Magnussen 1m36.097s
Marco Wittmann 1m36.144s
Robin Frijns 1m36.176s
Rene Rast 1m36.233s
Philipp Eng 1m36.595s
Raffaele Marciello 1m36.918s
Where will gains come from
Magnussen has had so little time in the car that just repeatedly getting behind the wheel is where his next steps are going to come from.
He's already come in and immediately been in an acceptable range of pace to his team-mates, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but certainly in the window of a very strong group. So there's a box ticked off.
“Just building up the confidence and pushing it, getting closer to the limit in a race,” he said when quizzed about areas for improvement.
“You don't really want to do that [in a race], but that's where I am. I think it's going okay. I think the pace is already very strong. I'm just trying not to make a mistake and slowly just build up my confidence.
“There's no reason to go straight onto the limit and risk a mistake or lock up. These things can be very costly in this way.
“I’m just taking my time.
“We've got a good team. The car is nice to drive, so I think we just got to build it up."
'Incredible' technical knowledge
It was never likely that Magnussen was going to rock up and his BMW team-mates were going to say bad things about him - that would hardly be constructive for the team!
But often you interview drivers who are disingenuous in praise/the amount of praise they are giving to team-mates. This was not the case with Philipp Eng.
Eng may be a familiar name - even if he was surprised that Magnussen knew who he was! - to many, as a DTM and Formula 2 (a different F2 to F1's current main feeder series) race winner, Formula E reserve and latterly a winner (whether in class or overall) of some of sportscar’s biggest races.
Despite being pressed for time after getting out of his stint, he was happy to talk at length about his new team-mate and his impact, even claiming he will learn something from Magnussen, rather than vice versa!
“So when I first met him, it felt like he already is with us since a few years,” said Eng.
“So he's very, very down to earth.
“And what I really appreciate about him, apart from the fact that he is a super nice guy, very funny, we are laughing a lot - in the truck when it doesn't count, let's say.
“But what I really appreciate about him, he has spent 10 years in Formula 1, the pinnacle of our sport, but he has so much idea of all the racing that's around it, and he knew me for some reason!
“I don't know why, maybe he watched an IMSA race every now and then, but he's a pure racer, and it's all about racing for him, and I think that's why he's enjoyed this race a lot, and he will enjoy WEC a lot.
“It's great to have him on the team, in the debriefs, and when we're talking to our engineers you can certainly tell he has spent so much time in Formula 1, his technical knowledge is incredible, I have to say, where I can still learn a lot from him.
“He's a very talented driver, apart from that, that's obvious, and we just learn from each other. So it's really great to have him on the team.”
“From the first day I came to here, I said it felt like he's already part of the team since five years,” added Andreas Roos, head of BMW M Motorsport, when asked by The Race how Magnussen had settled in.
“You see that he's a real motorsport professional.
“When you when you race for 10 years in Formula 1, then you have to be one of the very good ones. And he showed clearly this weekend that he is one of the best ones. And he was directly at home, I would say, here in endurance racing back in IMSA.
“As I said, it felt like he was never away, or he's even here since longer.”
If this is what his first race looks like, you wouldn’t want to be a rival manufacturer having to go up against him on the regular in this year's World Endurance Championship.
