Kevin Magnussen opened up on how in his rookie F1 season with McLaren, he was ordered to be as good as Lewis Hamilton or be sacked.

Reflecting on that as a “ridiculous set of expectations” to have, Magnussen felt it was in addition “disrespectful” to team-mate Jenson Button who, like Hamilton, was an F1 World Champion.

Kevin Magnussen told match Lewis Hamilton or out of McLaren

Hamilton and Button were McLaren team-mates from 2010-12, but after Hamilton departed for Mercedes, and Sergio Perez lasted only a year in his seat, Magnussen was signed to McLaren as a rookie for 2014, partnering Button.

He began his McLaren and F1 career in ideal fashion, making the podium with a P2 result in Australia, but that proved to be not only the sole podium with McLaren, but also Magnussen’s only podium in his F1 career.

And Magnussen has now shed light on how McLaren expected him to come in and have the edge over Button like they felt Hamilton had, giving him the numbers to achieve if he wanted to keep his seat.

Magnussen said he was “naïve” to go along with it and in hindsight wishes he had “stood up for myself”, as the pressure ultimately took hold.

“I remember Jonathan [Neale, managing director] and Éric [Boullier, racing director] telling me: ‘Lewis was an average of 0.15s faster than Jenson in qualifying over the three years they raced alongside each other, so, to retain your drive for next year, you should be aiming to beat Jenson by the same margin’,” Magnussen continued in a Motor Sport Magazine interview.

“I accepted it at the time but, looking back, it was unfair.

“Lewis and Jenson were both F1 World Champions, far more experienced than I was, and Jonathan and Éric were telling me that if I wasn’t as good in my rookie season as Lewis had been in his third, fourth and fifth F1 seasons, I’d be out.

“That was crazy – and also disrespectful to Jenson.

“Inevitably, that unfair weight of expectation heaped unnecessary pressure on me, and I began to make mistakes.

“It was a ridiculous set of expectations to push onto a 21-year-old rookie. I had the talent, I had the speed, but I needed support mentally and emotionally, and the senior McLaren management on the racing side offered the opposite.”

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Magnussen ended the season with 55 points to Button’s 126, and was replaced by Fernando Alonso for the 2015 season.

Magnussen’s final McLaren appearance came at the 2015 Australian Grand Prix in the place of an injured Alonso, though an engine failure meant he did not start the race.

A year with Renault and two stints with Haas followed in Magnussen’s F1 career.

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