Matt Bishop: Heroic Kubica vanquished racing's cruel blows - don't ask what might have been

But Kubica has never been a lesser man. You can knock him down, certainly – life did that to him with shocking efficiency – but you cannot keep him down. And so it was that in September 2012, almost two years after he had last raced or rallied anything, he entered the Ronde Gomitolo di Lana rally. It was, on the face of it, a modest event, but for Robert it represented something far greater: a tentative reaching back towards the thing that still defined him. It meant everything to him, and for that reason he gave it everything. And he won it.

What followed in 2013 was nothing short of astonishing. He entered the WRC2 rally championship, and he won it at his first attempt. In so doing he finished first in the Acropolis Rally, the Rally d’Italia, the Rally Deutschland, the Rally de France, and the Rally Catalunya. Those were not gentle introductions, nor were they playgrounds for the tentative. On the contrary, they were rallies that could have punished the smallest weakness, physical or psychological, just as the Ronde di Andora had punished Kubica in February 2011.

Yet in 2013 he conquered those five rallies with a right arm that was, by any clinical measure, less than optimal. That he did so spoke volumes about his adaptability, his intelligence, and his voracious will to win. It was a stupendous achievement, and one that did not attract the level of mainstream admiration that it deserved, simply because it unfolded outside F1’s selfish glare; even so, the more attentive cognoscenti watched and nodded with a mixture of awe and incredulity.

Over the next few years Kubica rallied and raced in various series, always with the same underlying narrative humming in the background: could he, would he, somehow find his way back to F1? The answer, improbably, was yes. In 2019 he finally returned, with Williams, completing a journey that many had assumed would be impossible. Yet if the comeback itself was heroic — and it was — the machinery was not. The 2019 Williams FW42 was a truly dreadful car, uncompetitive to the point of embarrassment, a vehicle that tested the patience and professionalism of anyone unlucky enough to be strapped into it. Kubica, to his credit, carried himself with dignity and humour, even when the stopwatch was merciless. The team scored a single F1 world championship point all year, and it was Kubica who scored it.

He would race in just two more F1 grands prix, both of them in 2021 – subbing at Alfa Romeo for Kimi Räikkönen, who had been struck down by Covid – but again the car was not good and Kubica failed to trouble the scorers on either occasion. F1 rarely generates fairytales unless the engineering cooperates, and in those brief returns there was no opportunity to demonstrate what might have been possible in better circumstances. And that, F1-wise, was that: there was no prolonged renaissance, no final flowering, just a sense of a door finally and poignantly being closed.

Yet motor sport, in its sprawling generosity, offers more than one stage on which greatness can be regained – and in 2025, at Le Mans, Kubica finally enjoyed a day of truly majestic glory. Sharing a Ferrari Hypercar with Phil Hanson and Yifei Ye, decent drivers both but neither blessed with Robert’s natural gifts, he won the most famous endurance race of them all. It was a wonderful achievement, very emotional and hugely popular, not least because it felt like a cosmic balancing of accounts, for here was a man who had been schooled by so much yet had adapted to those hard knocks so resolutely.

The response said everything. The readers of Motor Sport voted Kubica’s 2025 Le Mans 24 Hours victory “the greatest moment of 2025”. In a year crowded with sporting theatre, that accolade was remarkable. It was not about Le Mans, nor even about Ferrari. It was about Kubica, about resilience rewarded, and about a narrative that resonated far beyond lap charts and race strategies. People who understood racing knew, instinctively, that they had witnessed something extraordinary: a form of redemption that only sport, at its best, can occasionally provide.

So where does all that leave Kubica in the grand tapestry of F1 history? For the record, he started 99 F1 grands prix, and he won one of them. Inevitably, his story will therefore be hailed for ever as one of the sport’s great ‘what if?’ narratives. That phrase can sometimes sound dismissive, as though it consigns a career to the margins, but in Kubica’s case it does the opposite. It acknowledges just how great his potential was. He was, beyond any doubt, one of the most capable F1 drivers of the first quarter of the 21st century, a racer of extraordinary feel and intelligence, able to extract coruscating performance from F1 cars that his team-mates sometimes adjudged almost insuperably tricky. He might well have become an F1 world champion had he not entered “that damn’ rally”, as Boullier calls it, with the rueful honesty of a seasoned racing man who knows how close the Kubica story came to turning out very differently.

Another seasoned racing man, James Allison, who is now Mercedes’ F1 technical director and worked with Kubica at Renault in 2010, was never in any doubt about just how good his driver was. “If we can give Robert a car that’s even half capable of getting a world championship, he’ll get one,” he told the BBC at the end of that year.

“Not everyone in the pitlane can say that about their drivers. He’s properly committed to being F1 world champion, no doubt about that. He’s one of those very, very top guys where you know that if the car isn’t running at the front it’s because of the car, not him. He’s not only incredibly quick but you just know you can rely on him to do a fast lap when that’s what’s needed. You just know he won’t make mistakes when the pressure is on him, and he’ll plough out lap after lap after lap at a really good pace. He’s positive, demanding, and pushy – he expects a lot from everyone all the time – but he puts the work in himself, too.”

What might have been, what might have been.

Yet to define Kubica solely by what he did not become is to miss the point, for his story is not only one of loss, but also one of persistence, of fortitude, of reinvention, and of grace under pressure. In a sport obsessed with success, he has shown that character can be just as compelling as championships. So, as F1’s two famous 40-somethings, Alonso and Hamilton, continue to defy the actuarial tables, Kubica’s absence from the 2026 F1 grid is felt not because of what age has curtailed, but because of what misadventure devastated. He remains, in every meaningful sense, a racer’s racer, and his legacy — etched across great circuits, special stages, and above all that long, luminous night at Le Mans last summer — will endure long after the sorrow and frustration have faded.