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Robert Kubica got his first car at the age of four: “it had a four-stroke engine, no horsepower but still could do about 40kph”. He drove that until he got a real kart two and a half year later, and aged ten he got his racing licence and started competing.
With little motor racing infrastructure in his native Poland, Kubica started competing in Italy from the age of 13, driving for kart manufacturer CRG. Kubica coped with the cultural differences and continued to reap successes in karting. He raced against Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg among others in the European JICA championships, and Hamilton rates Kubica as one of his fiercest competitors.
Formula Renault and Formula Three
With the support and guidance of Daniele Morelli, Kubica moved into single-seater racing in 2001, in the Italian and European Formula Renault championships. In his second year he finished second in the Italian category behind Jose Maria Lopez.
Formula Three beckoned for 2003 and he scored a single win for Prema Powerteam at the Norisring street circuit, ending the year 12th. The following year he switched to ASL-Mücke and finished seventh in the championship but failed to repeat his win of the previous year.
At the end-of-season non-championship race at Macau he drove for Manor alongside Hamilton. Team boss John Booth said of the pair: “On the practice they’d go out and on the first lap Lewis would be 2.5s clear of everyone.” Kubica took pole for the qualifying race ahead of Hamilton, but Hamilton passed him at the start and won. In the final Kubica finished second behind Alexandre Premat after Hamilton was taken out by Rosberg.
World Series by Renault
For 2005 Kubica moved to World Series by Renault with the Epsilon Euskadi team. He won the title from Adrian Valles with four wins and seven other podium finishes, and 154 points to Valles’s 116. That earned him a test with the Renault F1 team, who did not offer him a place in the team.
Instead Mario Theissen of BMW, which had just become an F1 team independent of Williams, signed Kubica up before even having given him a test.
BMW
Kubica took up the role of third driver for BMW and completed 25,000km of testing for the team. When Jacques Villeneuve was dropped six races before the end of 2006, Kubica was promoted to the race team. He finished in the points on his debut at the Hungaroring but was disqualified for being underweight. He more than made up for that disappointment at Monza, however, where he raced to the podium in only his third F1 race.
BMW kept him on for 2007 and he initially seemed to struggle with the new Bridgestone tyres. Then during the Canadian Grand Prix he suffered a huge crash and was very fortunate to escape without injury. He missed the following round as a medical precaution but on his first race back he out-qualified Nick Heidfeld and raced to fourth.
Heidfeld retained the upper hand over the full season but Kubica came closest to winning a race. He retired from the lead of the Chinese Grand Prix at Shanghai shortly after taking the lead in the wet/dry race.
Kubica has single-handedly made F1 popular in Poland, although he has on occasion been frustrated by the unrealistic expectations his countrymen have of him given their lack of knowledge of the sport. At the beginning of 2008 he said: “Before I started in Formula 1 there was very little interest in the sport. Now it is a fact that the knowledge of Formula 1 in Poland is a lot higher and if you compare the television audiences of a couple of years ago with those of today, there is an incredible increase, but also the number of fans coming to the races, enjoying the sport and crossing their fingers for me.”
He remains with Heidfeld at BMW in 2008.
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