Grand Prix Rejects

Good evening everyone.

The subject of our latest GPR Driver Profile was a prodigy who took one look at Ayrton Senna's junior records and thought "aw that's quaint, watch this!". After rewriting the British F3 championship records in his own image in 1994, everyone thought Jan Magnussen was Formula One's next huge superstar. The mere fact you're about to read his profile seems to suggest this future didn't quite pan out as planned. 24 races and one lucky 6th place later, Magnussen's F1 career was over before his 25th birthday.

Once again, our esteemed writing prodigy Rob Dylan has tackled the mountain of sportscar results and hearsay for the benefit of GPR. Read about his ill-fated Stewart stint and his subsequent journey into a sportscar veteran right here today!

Driver Profile: Jan Magnussen

I liked this one, well done!

Jan is probably in contention for the most successful motorsport career for an F1 Reject.

This one certainly felt the most natural to write of the profiles so far. Magnussen has such a classic reject story, and a whole pile of anecdotes and stories written about him that the overall narrative just came together really well.

One fascinating trivia hole I climbed into while writing this one was the bad habits of drivers over the years. Even in the 90s, Magnussen was an outlier in his unhealthy habits, but research also unearthed that there have been drivers as recently as 2012 who are regular smokers, as Magnussen was. Points if you can guess who it was

The relationship between Jan and the team soured considerably, and Jackie Stewart’s resolution was to take the Dane for an infamous “driving lesson” around Oulton Park, essentially teaching the all-time record-holding British Formula 3 champion how to drive a racing car. Jan felt patronised, and it solved nothing in making him any quicker.

Tommy Byrne accuses Stewart of doing something similar when Theodore brought him in to talk Tommy around how to drive the Osterreichring. There has to be a meme in here somewhere.

I have to make some correction - the ITC races in 1996 he missed were due to him being racing in the Americas.

August 18 had ITC round at Silverstone and IndyCar round at Road America
September 1 had ITC round at Nürburgring and IndyCar round at Vancouver

Magnussen was replaced by Juan Pablo Montoya at Silverstone and by Ricardo Zonta in Nürburgring.

Rob Dylan wrote:One fascinating trivia hole I climbed into while writing this one was the bad habits of drivers over the years. Even in the 90s, Magnussen was an outlier in his unhealthy habits, but research also unearthed that there have been drivers as recently as 2012 who are regular smokers, as Magnussen was. Points if you can guess who it was

Jérôme d'Ambrosio was one. Maybe it wasn't such a problem at the wrong end of the grid...

Bleu wrote:I have to make some correction - the ITC races in 1996 he missed were due to him being racing in the Americas.

August 18 had ITC round at Silverstone and IndyCar round at Road America
September 1 had ITC round at Nürburgring and IndyCar round at Vancouver

Magnussen was replaced by Juan Pablo Montoya at Silverstone and by Ricardo Zonta in Nürburgring.

Thanks for the correction! I've deleted the mistake.

dinizintheoven wrote:Jérôme d'Ambrosio was one. Maybe it wasn't such a problem at the wrong end of the grid...

If that's true I didn't know it it's someone else I'd read about.