From F1 disaster to triumph: Robert Kubica's two monumental Montreal years

And now let’s deal with the disaster – except that, thank god, it was not actually a disaster. I am referring to the Canadian Grand Prix of 2007, the year before Kubica’s Montreal triumph. He qualified his BMW-Sauber eighth – good but not great and well behind his team-mate Nick Heidfeld in P3 – and he was running well enough until, on lap 22, Adrian Sutil crashed his Spyker at Turn 4, prompting a safety car deployment. Four laps later the safety car peeled into the pit lane, and the race was back on. On that same lap, approaching the hairpin, Kubica’s BMW-Sauber clipped Jarno Trulli’s Toyota, which Kubica had been trying to pass, ran wide onto the grass, hit a bump, and was launched airborne with savage force into a concrete wall. The car then ricocheted and barrel-rolled, three of its wheels were ripped from its chassis, its nose cone was torn away, and both its side pods were pulverised. Finally, it came to a rest against a barrier, on its side. Kubica’s feet were clearly visible where the front of his car had been wiped out, and his head was still.

I was a journalist in 2007, having not yet joined McLaren, and I was in the Montreal media centre that day. It was at that time a small and crowded room, usually filled with the noise of scribblers bickering, or laughing, or both. Now it was suddenly silent. We sat and watched the TV monitors, none of us daring to say what we were all privately thinking: was Kubica dead? The medical car arrived. The doctors crouched around the driver, their rushed movements telegraphing their concern. After what seemed like hours but was in fact only minutes, his motionless body was stretchered to an ambulance.

Sitting on the row ahead of me was Pino Allievi, the veteran La Gazzetta dello Sport journalist, a man who had counted Enzo Ferrari as a friend. I saw that he was punching a number into his mobile phone. He began to whisper, too quietly for the rest of us to overhear even in the eerie silence that now possessed the room. “I think he’s talking to one of the BMW-Sauber engineers,” someone said.

We waited. Allievi was no longer speaking, but his phone remained clamped to his ear. We waited some more. Suddenly he sat up very straight. “Si?” he said, pronouncing the word in an interrogative tone. “Si?” again. Now louder: “Si? Si? Si?” Then he stood, turned around, smiled his famously broad smile, and shouted at the top of his voice, in English, “HE IS ALIVE!”

So he was. So he is. In those days he was a truly brilliant driver. Had his right arm not been so badly injured in another huge shunt, this time on the first stage of the 2011 Ronde di Andora Rally, in a Skoda Fabia of all things, he would be still. Even now he is very good – he finished second in the LMP2 class at Le Mans on Sunday, just as he had done in the same race the year before, and he won the LMP2 class in the Spa-Francorchamps Six Hours six weeks ago – but he used to be as good as anyone we have ever seen. Yes, anyone.

He has had his triumphs, and, at just 38, he has them still; but they could have been even more triumphant. He has had his disasters, too; they could have been even more disastrous. Let’s just be thankful that they were not.