Robert Kubica loves the Le Mans 24 Hours. And he reckons he’s going to love it all the more this time around. He’s going back as the reigning champion and he didn’t want to miss out, even though there was what he only describes as a “new challenge” outside of sports car racing on the table for 2026. He might have come to regret it had he passed up the opportunity to return this year, he suspects.

“We all race for trophies, but I also race for the emotions and the feelings it provides,” reflects Kubica, who is bidding to make it two in a row with team-mates Phil Hanson and Yifei Ye at the centrepiece round of the World Endurance Championship, driving for the AF Corse Ferrari team. “In the future I might have regretted it if I didn’t go back as the winner of the race. I want to experience that. Inside the car, once I have my helmet on, it’s going to be the same. But outside the car, I think it will be something different.”

The love story with Le Mans began five years ago when Kubica contested the 24 Hours for the first time at the wheel of an LMP2 prototype. He would have had good reason to leave damning the place after his maiden assault on the big race. He was set to win the class, together with Ye and Louis Delétraz aboard a WRT-run ORECA-Gibson 07, when the car ground to a halt after cutting out under the Dunlop Bridge at the start of the final lap.

His first crack at the big race, aged 36, took him back to the earliest days of his career. “I’d followed the race a bit on television, but I was discovering the event and the track for the first time,” explains the Pole. “The adventure kind of disappears when you have been doing motor sport for so long, but going to Le Mans for the first time took me back to when I was a kid going to Italy for the first time at the beginning of my karting career. Le Mans is unique, though it’s difficult to explain it. There’s nowhere else quite like it and when I went there for the first time I experienced a 360-degree sweep of emotions, good ones and bad ones. To come so close to victory only made me want to achieve it even more.”

Kubica hints that he regrets not taking the challenge of Le Mans sooner in his career. “Knowing what Le Mans is offering I would probably have tried to do it earlier,” he reckons. “But if I didn’t do it, it was because I was focused on something else. So it was the right decision.”

In the years following the accident on the northern Italian Ronde di Andora rally in February 2011, which left Kubica with life-changing injuries and ended the first chapter of his Formula 1 career, circuit racing was firmly off the agenda. He threw himself back into rallying “to occupy my brain and keep it from negative thoughts, thinking of what might have been”. Kubica, who had been about to start his second season with Renault in F1, had a Ferrari contract for the following year in his briefcase. Rallying had been something in which he dabbled for fun and to hone his driving skills, but now it became what he calls “a relief valve”.

In the knowledge that he was now never going to win the F1 world title, he set himself what he regarded as an altogether loftier ambition. “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 recalls. “I just focused on a new challenge. There is nothing more complicated for the circuit driver than trying to compete at the highest level in the WRC. It’s a completely different sport.”

“We all race for trophies, but I also race for the emotions it provides”

Kubica ultimately fell short in his ambition to win a round of the World Rally Championship overall. He took the WRC2 title with the PH Sport Citroën team in 2013 and then made “one of my biggest mistakes” when he turned down the chance to drive a WRC car for the factory the following season. He’d only done a handful of rallies on gravel and didn’t have a full-time co-driver, so he decided that it was better to continue to learn his trade as a privateer, first with M-Sport and then, still with the Ford Fiesta RS WRC, his own entry supported by the Italian A-Style team.

Knowing that he wasn’t going to fulfil his ambitions in rallying, he changed course in 2016. Even though he competed only a few times — one rally and a couple of races — he was far from inactive. “I did very little in the spotlight, but I did some testing, quite a lot in a GP3 car,” he says. “The goal was to come back at the highest level possible in circuit racing. It was kind of a jump into deep water, back into the world in which I belonged. I thought I could go back to professional racing, but I didn’t know where.” It could have taken him into the WEC four years early. Kubica was scheduled to race for the ByKolles team in LMP1 before he opted out of the deal ahead of the season.

“I heard positive stories about Le Mans, but I thought, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’”

The Renault test ultimately took Kubica back into F1 with Williams, first as a reserve driver in 2018 and then for a full season of racing the year after. That was followed by three years as a reserve for Alfa Romeo (née Sauber) that included two race outings in 2021. That was his first year of sports car racing, which as well as encompassing his maiden Le Mans assault included a victorious campaign in the European Le Mans Series with WRT. Once again, Kubica was looking for a new challenge after his second F1 foray, plus his year in the DTM driving a BMW M4 Turbo DTM.

“I heard lots of positive stories about Le Mans when I was in F1, but I thought, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is an exaggeration,’” he shrugs. “In your life, you have to discover to understand. My motor sport adventure, and forget the fact that I have won the race, would not be the same without Le Mans. If a driver has the chance to do Le Mans, he should take it. It’s the same for young drivers and Macau. If as a young driver you haven’t done Macau, you haven’t done the best event you can possibly do.”

Kubica’s sports car adventure continued in 2022 with a full WEC campaign, this time with the Italian Prema team. It included another near-miss at Le Mans together with Delétraz and Lorenzo Colombo with second in class. A return to WRT in 2023 then yielded the WEC P2 title, though only another runner-up spot at Le Mans with Delétraz and Rui Andrade. The growth of the Hypercar category facilitated Kubica’s move to the top class of the WEC for 2024. He nearly ended up racing a Porsche 963 LMDh for the British Jota squad, before a drive in the ‘extra’ Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercar fielded by AF alongside the two full factory cars came into the equation. He couldn’t turn it down.

“One of the last painful things post-accident remaining in my mind was that I never had this chance to drive for Ferrari,” recounts Kubica. “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.”

“We were running P10 or P11 and when I got out we were at the front”

Kubica, Ye and Robert Shwartzman were frontrunners at Le Mans in 2024, before and after a 30-second time penalty after Kubica was adjudged to have been at fault for an incident that put Dries Vanthoor’s BMW out of the race during the night. They were back in the mix when a hybrid issue resulted in retirement with four hours to go. Fast forward 12 months, and Kubica was the star of the race. He outperformed all the drivers in the factory cars by some margin, though he is dismissive when it is pointed out that he was more than three tenths up on the nearest of them based on a 100-lap average. “Endurance racing is not about averages,” he says. The race was won for Ferrari when Kubica was at the wheel of a mammoth quintuple stint lasting three hours and 33 minutes at a time when the chasing Porsche, with Kévin Estre driving at the end, appeared to have a genuine shot at victory. He reveals that he felt “a kind of calmness in my driving, which is what you want in the moments when you are fighting for something big”.

Yet the stints that wowed the watching world and ultimately consigned Porsche Penske Motorsport to second position — and an exit from the WEC — aren’t the ones he chooses when asked to pick his best. Rather he plumps for his first turn at the wheel of the No83 Ferrari after taking over from Hanson after 6pm on Saturday. “I don’t think a lot of people saw it, but we were running P10 or P11 and when I got out of the car we were up at the front,” says Kubica of his first two hours. “I think Yifei was within six seconds of the leader when he went back out. That gave us a big boost. It is important to try to run Le Mans from the front. If you are chasing, you have to take more risks.”

This time around, Kubica believes he and his team-mates are going to Le Mans in a stronger position than 12 months ago, though he adds the caveat that the level in Hypercar remains on the up. The stability of the driver line-up — and the race engineer — will be important. “Continuity is important and for young drivers like Yifei and Phil a win can be a big lift,” he says. “But how the others will perform is the big unknown.”

Kubica, though, is going to savour the moment when he returns to Le Mans as the winner. His name will forever be linked to the big race and he says he’ll keep going back “so long as I am performing well and having fun.” Actually, he reckons he’ll be at Le Mans beyond that. “The first year I don’t race at Le Mans, I am going to go with some friends,” he smiles. “I want to live it as a fan.”

Le Mans or WEC title?

But Ferrari’s Phil Hanson will be gunning for both…

It doesn’t come much bigger than winning the Le Mans 24 Hours, but Phil Hanson received an accolade that is right up with it at the start of this year. He was announced as a Ferrari factory driver: “About the best you can achieve.”

He admits that it was “on my mind” when he signed to drive Ferrari’s satellite Hypercar entry for 2025. “It is something I wanted to be part of. I am incredibly competitive, so being aligned with a manufacturer that shares that passion for success is everything I ever wanted.”

The move has come off the back of a season in which Hanson won Le Mans and finished second in the Hypercar points. But he reckoned a win at the French enduro in ’25 was a long shot. “After Ferrari had won the previous two years, I thought we were almost guaranteed not to,” he admits. “It was only when I saw how relentlessly everyone was working that I realised it might be possible. Even though we’ve now won three in a row, there is still the same hunger for a fourth.”

Ask Hanson whether his hunger to add a WEC title to his CV is stronger than a desire for another Le Mans victory, and he appears to be leaning towards the former. “Seeing that we’ve now finished second in the WEC, to win it would be the obvious goal,” he reckons. “The reality is that winning that race and winning the championship often go hand in hand.”