Kevin Magnussen rues ‘extra frustrating’ engine issue with forced early exit
Haas driver Kevin Magnussen stops with an electrical issue in practice. Azerbaijan April 2023.
Kevin Magnussen was left to rue an “extra frustrating” issue that prevented him from putting in a flying lap in FP1.
The Dane’s Friday did not get off to a great start when a consistent but seemingly unidentifiable issue was causing him problems.
Those problems resulted in him being forced to cut his qualifying session short as, despite his protest, race engineer Mark Slade instructed him not to risk the car and return to the pit lane.
That saw him leave the session during Q1, ahead of only Nyck de Vries and Pierre Gasly who both crashed out, and with work to do on Sunday.
“It’s frustrating to be out with an issue but what can we do?,” Magnussen said. “We don’t know if it was an assembly issue or just something else out of our hands. It was just cutting out and misfiring, so I didn’t have much power down the straights – which showed on the lap time.
“It’s extra frustrating as I feel the lap time we did do with that electrical issue on my first run showed that we had some pace.
“It just didn’t happen today for us. Our time will come, it just hasn’t been too good so far. Not what we wanted but there’s still a long weekend ahead.”
It was not a good day around for Haas with Nico Hulkenberg also departing in FP1 and team boss Guenther Steiner said they needed to “regroup” before the sprint race on Saturday.
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“Not an ideal day today,” Steiner said. “Kevin had problems the whole day in FP1 and in qualifying with issues between the fuel pump and some electronics issue, so it’s difficult to comment what would’ve been possible.
“With Nico, his attempt on his second set of tyres was not perfect, there wasn’t a clean lap in it, and he clearly said it could’ve been a lot better.
“This is a long weekend of racing, there’s another qualifying tomorrow morning, for the Sprint, and two races over the weekend, so we just have to regroup and see that we get something more out of tomorrow.”
