Four years ago, Robert Kubica was denied class victory on his 24 Hours of Le Mans debut by a last lap technical issue. Earlier this month, history threatened to repeat itself as he nursed gearbox dramas in the closing stages behind the wheel of AF Corse’s leading Ferrari 499P Hypercar. If it was a stressful situation, he hid it well...
In what will surely go down as one of the great individual Le Mans performances, Kubica completed five consecutive stints at the end of the race – taking his overall lap count to 166, more than anybody else in the field and representing 43 per cent of the #83 entry’s total.
To put that another way, the Pole climbed into the car at 12:30 on Sunday. He did not climb out again until after the chequered flag fell some three-and-a-half-hours later. Those marathon final five stints equated to more than 800km, with – scheduled pit-stops aside – not a single break. If all three drivers played a key role in AF Corse’s success at La Sarthe, then Kubica was inarguably the star of the show.
“Initially, on paper, we had a slightly different plan,” the 40-year-old conceded, speaking to fiawec.com, “but after I jumped in the car [at Sunday lunchtime], I was asked if [five stints] would be possible.
“Ultimately, only the driver can tell how much they are exposing themselves to unnecessary risks due to the fatigue, which mounts up over the course of such an intense race because it’s difficult to rest, but straightaway I had a good feeling.
“Still, you never know how your body will react, so I said, ‘let’s wait and see’. On the one side, I was obviously aware of what we were fighting for and I felt that pressure as well as the pressure applied by the other Ferraris and the Porsche, but on the other side, I felt very calm because I knew we were capable of doing it and we managed the stints pretty well. I pushed when I had to push to open up the gap, to try to give us a bit of extra margin for any issues, and in the end, I felt quite fresh.”
While to the watching world, Kubica’s mind-blowing end-of-race heroics might have looked trouble-free, they were not without their scares, with a lack of hydration compounded by late gearbox gremlins that threatened to dash AF Corse’s dreams.
“The tube from my drinks system came loose and began flying around the cockpit,” the Kraków native explained. “I didn’t want to say anything on the radio, because once you do that, you attract attention to the problem and my worry was I might be told by the race director to come in to get it fixed – which would have been the last thing we needed!
“The only way to stop it moving around was to put it behind my shoulder and push it back against my seat. I drove like that for the last two hours, just taking a quick drink during each pit-stop. Fortunately, our car is very well-cooled so it wasn’t such a big problem, although when I jumped out at the end, I was ready for a nice can of Coke!
“We also had some late gearbox concerns, but at that stage of the race, you cannot think about it – you just have to stay positive and it’s definitely easier to be in the car than out of it! If I’d been in the garage, there would have been more time to think and have flashbacks to four years ago. Yifei [Ye – team-mate] was driving when we retired in 2021, but this time, because I was driving, I felt quite relaxed.
“Of course, technical issues can happen – that’s just motorsport. Except for the single safety car intervention, it was otherwise a flat-out race, so for the cars it was a very challenging Le Mans...”
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