19/01/2017
NEWS STORY
Following comments made by Renault Managing Director, Cyril Abiteboul, in terms of his motivation, Kevin Magnussen has hit back, hinting that all is not well within the French team.
Auto Hebdo quoted Abiteboul as saying that overall he was "disappointed" by Magnussen's performance in 2016 and felt the Dane looked for "excuses" to justify poor results.
The Dane however, who this week was busy at his new Banbury home as he met fellow team members at Haas, was not willing to take Abiteboul's criticism lying down.
"It's easy to say that someone is making excuses," he told Sky Sports. "I've said what I think and I've made my opinion clear about certain things and he was unhappy about it.
"It's fair enough, I can't stop him from being unhappy with me," continued the Dane, who is understood to have rejected the team's offer to remain and partner Nico Hulkenberg, "but it became a very public matter which I regret a little bit.
"I prefer things to be, if you are unhappy about something keep it between the person you are unhappy with, which he didn't do. He didn't keep it between me and him, he went public with it, and that's his way of doing things. That's fair enough with me."
Magnussen's comments come a week after Team Principal Frederic Vasseur sensationally quit the team, the Frenchman claiming that the reason behind his decision was a 'too many chiefs' situation, with (unnamed) people in charge appearing to have their own agendas.
Though giving little away, Magnussen appeared to confirm Vasseur's claim.
"It's in the past really," he said, "there's no reason for me to expand too much on the problems they have. They don't mean so much anymore. It's important that we beat them and I think we can do that.
"With the problems they have it's going to take a long time for them to improve," he added cryptically. "They have some very good people and it's a great bunch of guys there that I enjoyed spending my time with all last year and made many friends there. There's very few people that I don't get on with in there."
The Dane admits that he finds the atmosphere at Haas an improvement on the French team, which he feels is trying to cure its problems with cash.
"I've seen how resources isn't everything," he said. "You can have so many people, but if they don't work together then it doesn't mean anything.
"So completely going back to the core of a race team, which this is, it shows you how it should be really built up. You can't just throw people at a project and expect it to deliver. It's been interesting to see the difference.
"Our biggest challenge is going to be to extract everything and understand it properly because we are a small team and we don't have enough people yet to throw analysis on everything and get everything analysed," he admitted. "So we will have to work really hard to try and get the most out of the package we have, which I hope and think will be a good package."