Renault Sport managing director and the French team’s former driver Kevin Magnussen are engaged in a war of words in the aftermath of the Dane’s departure from the French team to join Haas.
Abiteboul told Auto Hebdo recently, “I was disappointed with Magnussen. Disappointed with his performances and his behaviour. He is a talented race driver but lacks the discipline and very often he made excuses.”
Magnussen responded in an interview with Sky Sport, “I think it’s easy to say that someone is making excuses. 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, 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.”
“It’s in the past really, there’s no reason for me to expand too much on the problems they [Renault] have. They don’t mean so much anymore,” he added.
“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.
“As I’ve said all the time, 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.”
Now a Haas driver, Magnussen is impressed with what he has seen at his new team’s UK base, “I’ve seen how resources isn’t everything, at all. ou can have so many people, 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.”
“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,” added 24 year old Magnussen, who will line up for his 41st grand prix start when he lines up on the grid in Melbourne on 26 March.
Read the full story at GRAND PRIX 247
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