What's next in the latest chapter of Kubica's amazing story

How does Robert Kubica rate his outright Le Mans 24 Hours victory? Where does it stand against the other achievements of his long and varied career, a Formula 1 win and the WRC2 title in the World Rally Championship included? He stops short of suggesting that it’s the high point, but he says something telling of his victory in the World Endurance Championship blue riband in June aboard the AF Corse Ferrari 499P shared with Yifei Ye and Phil Hanson: “It is the first time in my life that I have achieved the highest target I’ve given myself.”

That’s something Kubica didn’t do at the pinnacle of the sport. “In F1 I didn’t achieve it because I didn’t win the world championship,” he says, though he doesn’t want to compare victory at Le Mans with his F1 win at the Canadian Grand Prix driving for BMW Sauber in 2008. “Winning in Canada in F1 was 17 years ago; life has changed.” And of the rallying career that followed the enforced end of the first chapter of his F1 career, his aim was to win a WRC rally outright, a challenge he describes as “the biggest of my life”. That one remained unfulfilled after two seasons competing at the pinnacle of the series aboard a World Rally Car in 2014 and 2015.

It will matter not whether Kubica and his team-mates kick on from a victory that has promoted them to second in the points and take the WEC title over the second half of 2025. “You can aim to win the championship, but if you have to pick one, I think most people will always pick Le Mans,” he reckons.

The 40-year-old doesn’t hide his love of Le Mans in particular and 24-hour racing in general. “If someone were to tell me that there’s a championship where instead of eight races there are four and they are all 24 hours, I’d be the first to say, ‘I come’,” he says. The love affair began on his first appearance at the Circuit de la Sarthe in 2021 on his switch to endurance racing with the WRT LMP2 squad. He should have left with class victory aboard the ORECA shared with Ye and Louis Deletraz but for a freak last-lap retirement.

“Out of the negative emotions of the retirement came a massive amount of positive emotions that I hadn’t felt for a long time,” he recalls. “It took me back to when I was a small kid going to Italy [as his karting career ramped up] for the first time, discovering a new world, a new life. It was exactly the same with Le Mans 2021. I kind of fell in love with the race, and I always said I would like to have a chance to fight for an overall victory one day.”

Kubica clearly has an affinity with Le Mans: in his five attempts on the race – three times in P2, twice in Hypercar – he’s been a frontrunner each time. The cars he’s been racing have led more than 300 laps in class or overall in that time. “It brings you to a completely different level and you never know what you are going to face,” he says of the French enduro. “There’s big respect for the challenge.”

Despite a freak last-lap retirement while leading in LMP2 on his debut in 2021, Kubica's love for Le Mans has exploded

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

The change of tack came after an F1 comeback season with Williams and then a year in the DTM racing a privateer BMW for the ART squad. Kubica wanted a new challenge but wasn’t sure if a switch to endurance racing was the right move.

“You have to live it to understand it,” he explains. “When I was committing to endurance I didn’t know how I would react to working with my team-mates, sharing a car, sharing the decisions and the duties. I was coming from nearly 30 years of an egotistical, selfish approach, which you are taught from karting.”

Kubica’s endurance career began with a victory in the 2021 European Le Mans Series curtain-raiser at Barcelona with Ye and Deletraz. They would win twice more, either side of the Le Mans near-miss in the WEC, on the way to the title.

"I’d heard lots of nice stories about Le Mans, but I was too focused on F1" Robert Kubica

“I think endurance racing came at a good moment of my life,” explains Kubica, who recalls something WRT team boss Vincent Vosse told him early on in their relationship. “After one month he told me he always knew I would be competitive, but that he couldn’t be sure what to expect on the approach side.” Vosse ended up with no complaints. A willingness to make sacrifices “to bring the group forward” is, says Kubica, “one of my biggest, if not the biggest, strong points in endurance racing”.

This new-found love of all things endurance begs a question: does he wish that he’d made the move earlier in his career? Not while he was in F1, he points out. “I followed Le Mans as a fan; I am a big fan of the sport, anything with four wheels and an engine,” he says. “I’d heard lots of nice stories about Le Mans, but I was too focused on F1.” And after the accident on the Ronde di Andora in February 2011 derailed his ambitions to become F1 world champion, circuit racing was off the agenda.

Kubica threw himself into rallying, a branch of the sport in which he’d dabbled for fun and to sharpen his talents. He describes his decision to return to competition on the stages rather than the race track – and there was an offer from Mercedes to race in the DTM – as “an escape route” and “a blow-off valve”. He admits that he didn’t like the emotions he felt when he sat in a racing car at the time and set himself what he regards as a higher goal by trying to win a WRC rally.

Kubica wanted to set himself a higher challenge after his goal to be F1 world champion was derailed following his rallying accident

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

“In my mind I wanted to say I am trying to achieve something even higher than an F1 world championship, so that I didn’t have time to think of the past and the what-ifs,” he says. “I just focused on a new challenge. There is nothing more complicated for the circuit race driver than trying to compete at the highest level in the WRC. It’s a completely different sport. It’s like comparing volleyball and basketball: you have a ball and you use your hands, but the skills you need are completely different.”

The Pole won the 2013 WRC2 title driving a PH Sport-run Citroen and was offered the chance to move up to a World Rally Car for the following year with the French marque, which had supported his campaign at the lower level. He now calls the decision to turn them down as one of his “biggest mistakes” of his career, but at the time Kubica believed the time wasn’t right: “At that stage I didn’t have a co-driver, I had only done seven rallies on gravel…”

Instead, to continue to learn his trade, he chose to make the upwards step as a privateer, initially with a Ford Fiesta run by M-Sport and then with the same machine entered in collaboration with the Italian A-Style squad. He would only sneak inside the top 10 on a handful of occasions over two seasons.

Kubica concedes that he underachieved. “I had so much emotion, which was wrong,” he remembers. “My approach was not the correct one. Where I am today post-accident with my mental status, even with the little experience I had of driving rally cars, I would probably have achieved my goals.”

But he knew he couldn’t do that as a privateer, which is why he turned back to circuit racing. “I knew if I stayed in rallying, I would be fighting for P8 or waiting for someone to retire,” he explains. “I felt ready in the end to go back to my environment.

“That was a year, 2016, when you hardly saw me doing anything,” he says of a season in which he contested the Monte Carlo Rally at its beginning and a Renault Sport Trophy one-make event towards its end. “I started testing secretly in a GP3 car: I started putting pressure on my body to see where I ended up. At that point, honestly, I didn’t think about F1.”

But F1 came calling. A couple of tests with Renault, his employer at the time of the accident, aboard a 2012-spec car in the summer of 2017 led to a reserve role with Williams the following year and on to a race seat in 2019.

After his rallying exploits the call to return to circuit racing was too great to ignore

Photo by: Sutton Images

“I went to that test with Renault knowing that I wouldn’t struggle from a physical point of view,” he says. “But I had doubts about it mentally: if my brain would be capable of driving something so fast while processing all the information required. In a few laps at Valencia, I realised I could drive an F1 at competitive level. Unfortunately, I was not able to show it [with Williams] in 2019, but I still believe my F1 comeback was my biggest achievement as a person. It was a long journey, a tough one, but I’m happy that I made those decisions.”

Kubica’s second stab at F1 overlapped the beginnings of his endurance racing career. His second and third years as a test driver with Alfa Romeo (nee Sauber) came while he was racing for WRT in the ELMS and then Prema in LMP2 in the WEC in 2022. That stint included a further two grands prix starts in 2021 after Kimi Raikkonen contracted COVID.

The Prema year in P2 yielded the runner-up spot at Le Mans with Deletraz and Lorenzo Colombo before it was back to WRT for 2023 for what turned out to be a successful assault on the WEC LMP2 championship alongside Deletraz again and Rui Andrade. Their run to the title included another second in class at Le Mans for Kubica.

"One of the last painful things post-accident remained in my mind that I never had this chance to drive for Ferrari. I thought, if I didn’t do it, maybe I will have to live for the next 20 years with, perhaps not regrets, but doubts" Robert Kubica

It was “perfect timing” to move up to Hypercar as the class expanded for 2024, the addition of the extra 499P run on a satellite basis by AF included. “I was quite confident that I would be in a car, whatever brand it would be,” says Kubica. “I put as the priority the goal of winning Le Mans. This was one of the reasons why quite early we approached Amato [Ferrari, boss of AF Corse]. Then the project kind of diverted and they only came back quite late.”

Kubica admits that he should have been signed up for 2024 already by the time AF Corse showed renewed interest. He doesn’t name the team, but it was almost certainly Jota, then running privateer Porsches. The chance to race a Ferrari tugged at Kubica’s heartstrings, he concedes. It offered a kind of closure because at the time of his accident, on the eve of what would have been a second season with Renault, he had a Ferrari contract in his briefcase for 2012.

“If not the last, but one of the last painful things post-accident remained in my mind that I never had this chance to drive for Ferrari,” he says. “I thought, if I didn’t do it, maybe I will have to live for the next 20 years with, perhaps not regrets, but doubts.”

Having been so close to joining Ferrari in F1 and fighting for wins and titles, taking Le Mans victory with the Scuderia soothed the pain he had been feeling

Photo by: Rainier Ehrhardt

Kubica could yet end up as a world champion with Ferrari, as many have suggested he could have done with the Scuderia in F1. The title would, he reckons, be “a great way of finishing an already positive season”. But with the biggest box ticked, he is already looking to the next phase of his career, though he’s not telling us to expect him to depart the WEC.

“If I have the opportunity to race a competitive car at Le Mans, I would be surprised if I didn’t take it,” he says. “But that doesn’t exclude probably trying to do something different, something new. What I am saying is that I might do something else as well, though there is nothing in place. With my approach and at my age, I know what makes me happy, what makes me get up in the morning and keeps the passion as high as it was when I was a kid racing karts.”

The amazing motorsport journey of Robert Kubica might yet have another twist.

With eyes on the WEC title after the Le Mans triumph, Kubica's motorsport journey could yet take more exciting twists and turns

Photo by: Alexander Trienitz