Kevin Magnussen admits to making the wrong tyre decision after the F1 sprint in Emilia-Romagna – The Dane dropped from P4 to P8
With fourth place in qualifying, Kevin Magnussen was one of the big winners at Imola on Friday. Just one day later, the Dane is one of the biggest losers, at least by lost positions, with his drop back to eighth in the F1 sprint
Magnussen and teammate Mick Schumacher were the only drivers to complete the sprint race on the medium tyres. “I was super surprised to see everyone on the Soft tyres. We tried the Soft in practice and thought it would wear out way too quickly,” Magnussen expressed surprise.
“I got a bit nervous when I saw that everyone was starting on the Soft. Then they all overtook me at the beginning because they were logically much faster. But towards the end it evened out a bit. “
In retrospect, Magnussen has to admit that he made the wrong tyre decision with the Haas team: “The soft tyre was the right one for the race. Nevertheless, we still got a point and will start from P8 tomorrow, from where we can hopefully get more points.”
The Haas driver admits he was wrong in his assessment of the red tyre in the second free practice session: “In practice, the tyre broke down on lap 13 and I would have expected it to continuously get worse after that.”
“But when I look at the others, the tyre did drop during that time, but they were able to stabilise their pace after that and were as fast as me,” he added. “So the soft tyre was the right one, which I misjudged. “
Magnussen: DRS effect too big
However, as it was very easy for the drivers to overtake Magnussen on the track, he was asked if the DRS effect might be too big at the moment: “For me, of course, it’s easy to say now because I was overtaken, but I do think the DRS was very powerful.”
The early safety car period, triggered by the clash between Pierre Gasly and Guanyu Zhou, further disadvantaged Magnussen as the other drivers had to do fewer laps on the not so durable soft tyres under full load. “It wasn’t really advantageous for me now because the harder tyre doesn’t come back to temperature as quickly,” explained the Haas driver.
In the starting phase, it also became quite close with Sergio Perez and Daniel Ricciardo. The TV replay showed that the Australian and Magnussen touched slightly in turn one. However, this did not have any major consequences for the Dane as he “didn’t even notice”.
Magnussen suggests changes to sprint format
In Imola, the Haas driver completed his first sprint race. He doesn’t seem to be entirely happy with the format yet: “The weekend is very full, but apart from that it’s quite nice. There are still small things that could be changed, especially with regard to the parc ferme rules. I also think qualifying should be the grid for Sunday.”
Magnussen says it is particularly difficult for the smaller teams to decide on the weekend set-up after the first free practice. The top teams, of course, with their high-tech simulators, have completely different conditions to make a tight set-up choice weeks in advance.
