Encyclopedia

DRIVERS: ROBERT KUBICA

Name: Robert Kubica
Nationality: Poland
Date of birth: December 7, 1984 - Krakow, Poland

Robert Kubica, Italian GP 2006 

 © The Cahier Archive

Kubica was mad about speed when he was just a toddler and at four talked his father into buying him a tiny off-road vehicle. He then moved on to karts at seven but could not get a licence to race until he was 10 and so had to make do with running around in car parks. He then did three years of racing in Poland before his father decided to take him international. After three races they ran out of money but the CRG kart company recognised his talent and took him on to test and race. That year he became the first foreign driver to win the Italian national kart championship and was second in the European series and he remained a top level kart racer until switching to cars in 2001. He was signed up as a member of the Renault Development Driver programme and in 2002 finished runner-up in the Italian Formula Renault series and seventh in the European series. He was due to move up to the Formula 3 Euroseries in 2003 but was a passenger in a serious road accident and suffered serious arm injuries which meant that he had 18 titanium bolts in his arm. Despite this he entered the Euroseries with Prema Powerteam and won his first race and was 12th at the end of the year, despite his late start. In 2004 he moved to ASL Mucke Motorsport but it was a poor year and was dropped by Renault. He decided to race in the Renault World Series in 2005 with the Epsilon Euskadi team and dominated the championship and so earned an F1 test drive with Renault and did so well in that test that three weeks later he was signed by the BMW Sauber F1 Team to be its test driver in 2006. His impressive showings in Friday testing at races and in private tests led BMW to decide to drop Jacques Villeneuve before the Hungarian Grand Prix. Kubica set tongues wagging when he qualified ninth and raced to seventh before his car was excluded for being fractionally underweight - a disappointment for the ambitious Pole. At Monza - his third race - he led the Grand Prix and finished third. This impressive work led to him being retained by the team in 2007.