F1 star blasted by rival after collision: 'I was about to throw a punch'

Kevin Magnussen

F1 star blasted by rival after collision: 'I was about to throw a punch'

Well that's not very welcoming!

Chris Deeley Editor

Experienced sports writer covering F1 and other motorsports since 2023

Thursday 25 June 2026 21:45

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Kevin Magnussen got out of his NASCAR debut unscathed on Sunday in San Diego...but according to one driver, that was a close-run thing.

The long-time F1 star made an enemy of habitual backmarker Noah Gragson early in the race when he tried to nudge the Front Row Motorsports driver out of the way to make a pass.

The contact, which didn't spin Gragson or damage his car, seemed to flip a switch in the 27-year-old's head – leading to him taking every possible opportunity to nudge Magnussen himself throughout the race, including two bumps when the field was slowly getting rolling after a red flag while his team implored him to 'be smart' on the radio.

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Once Gragson had taken half a dozen unnecessary retaliatory shots at him, Magnussen finally responded – turning the Front Row car around and ultimately ending his day. That led to a heated post-race confrontation, where a furious Gragson yapped at Magnussen just inches from his face while the former Haas man calmly told him, in not so many words, to leave him alone.

The NASCAR star, who sits 29th in the Cup Series points standings after the race, has now admitted that he had gone to find Magnussen with the intention of punching him – before being told that there would be 'long-term consequences for his job' if he got physical.

Gragson: I was over it – sick and tired

Speaking on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, he explained that he has reached breaking point with the vast majority of outside drivers coming into NASCAR and taking a minute to dial into the appropriate level of physicality on the track.

"What I'm most mad about is that you're in our ball field, in our ballpark, and we're out here and we race the 38-race season," Gragson said. "To come in here on lap 3 and be jamming up the inside and running into guys and driving into their doors, not just myself but other guys, it's frustrating and you see it a lot with guys in the past.

"Maybe I'm just a magnet to it, but Sage Karam comes to mind. You get other guys who come in from the open wheel, and maybe not just open wheel, I mean some of the V8 guys, not Shane [Van Gisbergen], but Will Brown, we had actually a pretty funny conversation last year after Daytona, but I think they see how much rougher and how much more contact there is [in NASCAR] than maybe some FIA forms of motorsports, where F1, they kind of have a zero touching policy.

"We do have a bit of contact, but they feel like it's 10x more than that, and that's what pisses me off. You're coming into our ballpark and running into us. He hit me super hard going into turn 12, and then after I watched him do it to three other guys, it made me mad. And I raced him hard for the rest of the day, and then I was blocking him because I was over it. Sick and tired. And then he wrecked us."

NASCAR star: I really, really, really wanted to fight KMag

He continued: "I really, really, really, wanted to go fight. I was about to throw a punch and I got told right before I got over there that there's going to be long-term consequences with my job if that was the case, and so I had to really restrain it.

“It's a no-win situation. We're not gonna deal with that guy, probably ever again, if we do, that'll be fun, you know, I’d be excited.

“It is what it is. I move on. I'm racing again this weekend and I'm gonna just do as best of a job as I can for the No. 4 team.

"This season, there’s a lot of frustrations on top of that that kind of boiled over to that moment, but that was kind of the ticking time bomb and it finally went off.”

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