How Magnussen will race under F1 ban threat for 11 months

Under F1’s penalty points system – introduced in 2014 – some of his rivals have approached the threshold of 12 points and automatic suspension for one event. Daniil Kvyat in 2017, Lewis Hamilton in 2020, and Pierre Gasly last year. But their time close to the limit lasted just a few months in each case.

Rewind 27 years and Jacques Villeneuve faced having to go nine races with a suspended race ban sentence from the 1997 Italian Grand Prix – where he’d driven too quickly under yellow flags in pre-race warm-up.

Effectively this was a nine-month sanction given the differing length of the calendar back then, but Williams’ decision to withdraw its appeal over his penalty at the Japanese GP three races on meant forfeiting that result and the risk being removed.

Magnussen has an 11-month wait – assuming he starts the 2025 season with his Haas contract up for renewal this year.

That’s 17 total races in 2024 where even an innocuous incident such as Logan Sargeant at the Chinese GP – accidentally overtaking under the safety car at the pit exit – could trigger the ban.

Having now gone into battle with the threat hanging over him for the first time last weekend at Imola, how did Magnussen find it?

“I didn’t think about it,” he replies in an exclusive interview with Motorsport.com. “I have to still keep pushing otherwise I spend the next 20 races cruising around. I’m not gonna do that. It doesn’t make sense either.”

Magnussen is referring to how he’s already laid out his case, again, in questioning how he has ended up in this position. We’re speaking in the Haas motorhome after Monaco has been given a soaking on Thursday afternoon. The Dane, as ever, is immaculate. And here he’s articulate too.

“If you compare with the way that I was racing Lewis [Hamilton] in Miami – that was as hard as I can race anyone,” he says when asked if the sense he’d held back more racing rivals at Imola was the reality in his Haas cockpit, having in part arrived at this point for his decision to race excessively defensively in the Miami sprint against Hamilton to try and protect team-mate Nico Hulkenberg’s position there.

Magnussen acknowledges Haas didn’t ask him to do that in Miami, but it had in a similar situation in Jeddah at the start of the campaign. It has been suggested this led to tensions within the American…