Thank Frankel it’s Friday: A sad goodbye to Robert Kubica in Formula 1

And even in rather less vaunted forms of motor-racing, that is an unenviable position to occupy, and I speak with some experience of the matter. Of course for me and almost all amateurs like me, we can comfort ourselves that the reason we are coming last is that everyone else out there has a faster car. It may even be true. But in F1, with your team-mate on the other side of the garage and where the slightest move of hand or foot can be blown up to full screen size on the telemetry, there is nowhere to hide.

All told, it has not been the comeback Kubica or any of his legion of fans around the world would have hoped for. But perhaps the bigger surprise was that he even got the drive in the first place. Of course Williams does not have the pick of the field as might Mercedes-Benz or Ferrari, and I am not privy to whatever finances Robert may or may not have been able to bring to the party, but Williams must have known from its own testing data that he was going to struggle.

History was not on his side either. There have of course been some incredible sporting comebacks after fearful injury and I’ve written about them here before: Lauda after the Nürburgring in ’76, Mika Hakkinen after Adelaide in ’95, Fangio after Monza in ’52, Johnnie Herbert after his F3000 crash at Brands in ’88, AJ Foyt being pronounced dead at a NASCAR race in 1965 and, of course, our own Billy Monger. There have also been just a few incidences of comebacks after years away from the sport – Mike Hailwood’s TT win in the Isle of Man in 1978 some 11 years after his last visit being the one that springs most readily to mind.

But what Kubica was trying to do was unprecedented. Not only was aiming to return after eight seasons away, he was trying to return to the very top level of racing and after suffering an injury that most would have presumed would have ruled him out of all levels of professional motorsport. But through his own determination he defied the doubters and returned to Formula 1, and I wish it had gone better for him.

For me the sadness as a fan is that we never got to see him at his best. He was just 26 when he had that accident in a rally in Italy that left him with multiple injuries, far and away the most serious being a partially severed right arm. At that time you’d not have found an objective and authoritative commentator who did not count him among the very best out there and still getting better. Some ranked him as number one.

There is no question in my mind that he would finally have got the drive his talents so richly deserved and that we would now regard him as among the greats of 21^stcentury motor sport. In the event however his Formula 1 record will close at the end of this year with him likely to have started 97 Grands Prix and extracted just one win, one pole and one fastest lap from them all. Rarely has one man’s talent been so poorly represented by his results.

Photography courtesy of Motorsport Images.