Jan
Magnussen

Jan Magnussen was born in Roskilde in 1973. He won the 1992 Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch. In 1994 he raced in British Formula 3 for Paul Stewart Racing, winning fourteen of the eighteen races and beating Ayrton Senna's F3 record.

He made his Formula One debut at the 1995 Pacific Grand Prix at Aida, driving a McLaren in place of Mika Häkkinen. He was the first Dane in Formula One since Tom Belsø in 1974. In 1996 he competed in CART and the International Touring Car Championship. For 1997 and 1998 he drove for the newly founded Stewart team. In 1997 he was entered in 17 races and started 16: his car was damaged in an accident at the start of the Brazilian Grand Prix, and he retired before the restart. He scored his only championship point in 1998, in his final Formula One race, the Canadian Grand Prix, after which Jos Verstappen took his seat. Magnussen finished 1998 in 16th place in the drivers' standings, with 24 starts in total and no podiums.

After Formula One he contested seven CART races in 1999 and raced for Panoz in the American Le Mans Series. With Corvette Racing he won his class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans four times (2004, 2005, 2006 and 2009) and the IMSA sportscar championship in 2017 and 2018. At the 12 Hours of Sebring he won the GT1 class in 2006, 2008 and 2009, and in 2015 he won the GTLM class at the 24 Hours of Daytona. In the Danish Touring Car Championship he took the title in 2003 and 2008. He made his NASCAR Sprint Cup debut in 2010 and finished twelfth at Infineon Raceway. He was a General Motors works driver until the end of 2020, and in 2023 he won the Aurum 1006 km endurance race in Lithuania.

His son Kevin is also a racing driver and has competed in Formula One for Haas, McLaren and Renault.

Source: Wikipedia, “Jan Magnussen”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.