In RACER Magazine: Gen Magnussen

It's our sport's favorite tale, of sons following famous fathers into battle. It's the Andrettis, Brabhams, Earnhardts, Pettys, Rosbergs, Unsers, Villeneuves, and an ever-growing list of winners or champions producing mop-haired savants, predestined to honor the bloodline.

The harder, grittier stories involve families where careers pitched and heaved before running aground. But a rare few of those include a coda where our suffering heroes pry themselves off the rocks, patch their wounds, and pursue a different course to stardom. Jan and Kevin, the racing Magnussens of Denmark, are perhaps the epitome of that.

Now 43, Jan's curly blonde locks have given way to razor and shaving cream, but the fight remains strong within the impish Dane. Beyond the speed genes passed down to Kevin, Jan's steely resolve could be the most valuable gift bestowed upon his son.

"He's a tough little bastard," Jan says with a wry smile. "And he's needed it."

Through a stop-start ration of character-building Formula 1 seasons, the 24-year-old is already experiencing his father's turbulent open-wheel rise in ways that feel like a rebooted 1990s movie franchise.

The Magnussen arc, new and old, follows a familiar plot: As the 2013 Formula Renault 3.5 champion, Kevin was drafted into the McLaren team as an F1 rookie in 2014, where he impressed alongside Jenson Button. His ascent ended abruptly when he was parked in '15 for an all-champion pairing of Button and the inbound Fernando Alonso.

With his career shifted into park, Magnussen left McLaren in 2016 for what would prove to be a wasted season with an uncompetitive Renault F1 team. The team's turmoil and intransigence in recommitting hastened yet another sea change for Kevin, and for 2017, the burgeoning Haas F1 team gave him his third home in four years. If only this was an original conversation around the Magnussens' dinner table.

Spin the clock back to 1994, and as two-year-old Kevin sat at home, Jan rocked the sport by breaking Ayrton Senna's record for earning the most victories in a single season on his way to winning the British Formula 3 title. With a fresh McLaren F1 testing contract in hand, Magnussen would also impress during a one-off debut for the team in 1995. But two decades before his son met a similar fate, Jan wasn't considered a long-term prospect when McLaren drafted David Coulthard to partner Mika Hakkinen in '96.

"Obviously I hoped it was going to be McLaren; already in '95 I had one race [with them] in Japan when Hakkinen had his appendix out," recalls Jan. "[After that] I couldn't really see an opportunity was going to present itself for me at McLaren."

Placed in a DTM/ITC development program (alongside Dario Franchitti) with McLaren partner Mercedes for 1995-'96, Jan grew weary of waiting for a chance that wasn't going to come. By the end of '96, with the ITC imploded and no sign of a McLaren-Mercedes F1 opening, he asked for a release to join the Stewart Grand Prix startup for 1997.

“When the Stewart F1 thing came up, I jumped at it,” he recalls. Helmed as it was by his former mentor Jackie Stewart and underwritten by Ford dollars, why wouldn’t he have? But it would be the leap of faith that nearly ended his career.

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