Photos courtesy of Ferrari SPA and BMW Motorsport
Robert Kubica’s victory in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, alongside his AF Corse Ferrari 499P Hypercar teammates Phil Hanson and Yifei Ye, completed a motorsports comeback story for the ages. Had it not been for one moment’s misjudgment on a tricky stretch of Italian asphalt that led to life-changing injuries, recent Formula 1 history could have been very different.
Of all the ifs, buts and maybes in a racing life, the one certainty is that Kubica’s reputation was one of the most highly regarded of his generation – rated by peers such as Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel alike. But his upwardly mobile F1 career was cut short following that vicious crash during a minor event in 2011, during which a guardrail straked through the middle of his Skoda Fabia, inflicting 42 broken bones as it slashed across the right side of his body.
That put him on an incredible recovery journey, and not just from the multiple surgeries that tried to repair the damage, which included the partial amputation of his right forearm. “In other sports, like football, if you kick the ball wrong, to the side or over the bar, nothing bad happens,” he mused to me a couple of years later. “In rallies, if you make a small mistake, you can learn a big lesson.”
And yet, despite the sport that had effectively cost him his living, Kubica made his motorsports comeback in rallying, as if to prove a point, before rejoining the circuits and targeting F1 once more. “At one period of my recovery, driving was my best medicine,” he stated. “Honestly, [with my injuries] I have bigger limitations in daily life than in driving cars. For me, racing is everything.”
A Straightforward Racing Soul
“Give me a roof over my head, food to eat and a fast race car,” he once said. “That’s all I need… all I’ve ever needed.”
During his Formula 1 career – which was cut off in its prime just as he looked poised to join Ferrari for 2012 – he also stood out in the paddock as one of the most down-to-earth drivers there. From an unsophisticated working-class background in Krakow, Poland, where his father ran a small printing business, Kubica never put on airs. In fact, apart from being a high performer among the driving elite, the only club he really fit into was F1 ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone’s exclusive poker group!
Incredibly focused, he’s known to be very blunt with those inside his team if he thinks it’ll increase his chances – highlighted by some stressful radio calls when it came to mid-race team orders last weekend. But that’s not to say he’s unapproachable, far from it. When he’s not going about the serious business, he’s got an incredibly dry and often self-deprecating sense of humor (that he likely required during his long recovery) that endears him to his engineers and mechanics.
When he arrived in F1, Kubica was simply faster than the BMW Sauber Team’s 2006 race drivers Nick Heidfeld and Jacques Villeneuve (and he went on to effectively end former world champion Villeneuve’s top-level career). You could track that speed right back to his karting days, where he regularly battled Hamilton. It was rumored that he was the only driver Lewis ever truly feared.
Kubica had already proved that he was tough: his fearsome shunt in 2007’s Canadian Grand Prix was shrugged off, and he won there 12 months later (pictured above) – an incredible drive which I was fortunate enough to witness. Sadly, that would prove to be his first and last Grand Prix victory, although he did return to the F1 grid in 2019 with Williams after eight seasons away. Following a couple of further F1 outings in the COVID-afflicted 2020 season with Alfa Romeo, subbing for Kimi Raikkonen (while also racing in the DTM touring car series), he turned his attention to endurance prototype racing.
Climbing Another Mountain
Unsurprisingly, Kubica was rapid when he joined the LMP2 sports car ranks, conquering the European Le Mans Series with Team WRT in 2021. But he agonizingly missed out on class victory at Le Mans due to a last-lap car failure while he was at the wheel. Robert then claimed the World Endurance Championship’s LMP2 title two years later, which earned him a shot in Ferrari’s Hypercar team for 2024, as it added a third car with AF Corse that carries the ‘Giallo Modena’ colors.
On Sunday, he conquered Le Mans with an outright victory in the world’s toughest sports car race – 14 years after the crash that changed his life. Seeing him hoist that giant trophy with his team-mates was a heart-lifting moment to conclude the 93rd running of the fabled event.
“Winning Le Mans is a special feeling,” he said. “Since the 2021 edition, when I lost the victory due to a technical problem on the last lap, I fell in love with this race, which reawakened feelings I hadn't felt since my karting days. Now I'm very excited, full of adrenaline but physically tired at the same time.”
He has good reason to be tired. The 40-year-old Kubica drove 166 of the car’s 387 laps and completed the final five stints, which added up to over 3.5 hours, to avoid a time-consuming driver change in the closing stages. He battled against persistent gearbox downshift issues throughout, which meant he had to adjust his braking style… and his drinks bottle wasn’t working for much of that mammoth final run!
Another recent Le Mans winner, Fernando Alonso, summed it up perfectly: “He's a legend of our sport, and now he's even more after winning Le Mans in his career.”
