Hamilton loved F1 star who won one race but was 'best driver team boss ever saw'

27 January 2024 , 06:00

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Lewis Hamilton spoke very highly of former competitor Robert Kubica (Image: Getty Images)

He may have only won one Formula 1 race, but Robert Kubica is "one of the most talented drivers" Lewis Hamilton has ever faced.

The Pole started 99 races in his F1 career and stood on the podium after 12 of them. That solitary win came at the 2008 Canadian Grand Prix, after Hamilton crashed into Kimi Raikkonen in the pit lane and left the BMW Sauber driver clear to taste victory for the first time.

Perhaps many more might have followed - but we will never know. Kubica suffered serious injuries in a rally race in early 2011 which scuppered a planned move to Ferrari and effectively ended his F1 career.

He later returned to the grid in 2019 which was an extraordinary achievement in itself. But the Williams team he joined was not at all competitive and, at the end of that season, he left to race in the German DTM series while taking on a reserve role with Alfa Romeo.

As far as Hamilton is concerned, the crash robbed F1 of an extraordinary talent. He once said of the Pole: "I've known Robert the longest, we started racing each other in go-karts in 1998 - for me, Robert is one of the most talented drivers that I've competed against.

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"From the beginning, I already saw the talent that he had. I think what's really remarkable is the strength and the determination he's shown to get through the incident he had.

"Not a lot of people can come from those kinds of circumstances and make it back into the sport and deliver against others who don't have the same situation as him. It's been great to have him back. It's definitely not the same scenario as when he was in a competitive team back in the day but I think he's done great this year."

During his time at BMW Sauber, Kubica worked closely with Mike Krack who these days is team principal at Aston Martin. The racer left such an impression on him that, speaking in 2022, the Luxembourger named him as "the best I've ever seen" in terms of driving talent.

Kubica found that final spell with Williams difficult, given just how poor the car was. He was also up against George Russell, in his rookie F1 season, who was heralded for his raw talent - something that the Pole later admitted was tough to swallow.

"People forget that I was the one who managed to get a world championship point that year and that was no easy task with that car," he told RacingNews365. "It was an important moment in my racing career. It was the culmination of the long road I had to travel to get back into an F1 car and to get back into life at all. A moment that unfortunately very few people remember, but that is how it works in Formula 1."

Daniel Moxon