Lewis Hamilton is regarded by many as the greatest Formula One driver in history... but not by Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack.
That is because Krack has named Robert Kubica, who won the Canadian Grand Prix in 2008, as his all-time F1 favourite. The Polish driver was an unlikely challenger to Hamilton for the 2008 Drivers' Championship, as the Brit won the first of his seven world titles.
The Canadian GP returns to the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal on Sunday, with championship leader Max Verstappen on pole. Aston Martin's Fernando Alonso completes the front row, with Mercedes duo Hamilton and George Russell sitting behind them.
Kubica is one of the most popular F1 drivers of his generation and could've gone on to become a world champion if it wasn't for the horrific crash he suffered at the Ronde di Andora rally in February 2011. The near-fatal incident severely damaged Kubica's right arm.
Krack has described Kubica as "the best one I've ever seen". The Aston Martin chief told the Beyond the Grid podcast in 2022: "From a pure talent, I think how he has a feeling in describing the car, I think he is really, really, really strong."
Kubica joined the now-defunct BMW-Sauber team in 2006 and came close to winning an unlikely title in 2008. After his victory in Montreal that year, he led the Drivers' Championship ahead of Hamilton in the McLaren and title rival Felipe Massa in the Ferrari.
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Kubica ended up finishing fourth in 2008. His crash forced him to miss the 2011 season, and he has only had one full-time seat in F1 since (for Williams in 2019). The popular Pole has also spent time as a test driver for F1 teams, as well as competing in other events.
Krack believes Kubica might have even won the title in 2008 if BMW decided against halting upgrades on their car to focus on the 2009 machine. The decision led to Kubica and Krack, who was BMW's chief engineer at the time, eventually quitting the team.
Krack added: "You remember that I left [in 2009]? There is a link there. We had worked our way up so hard from 2001 onwards in order to become a winning team. A winning team is maybe wrong because we won one race at the end, but we had pole position in Bahrain, I think we were second in Melbourne. So I think, we will say, a podium team.
"It was such a good climb over the years, making progress. I was a bit concerned about the new regulations, because 2009 was the introduction of KERS [Kinetic energy recovery system]. It was still very open, of mandatory use or not, on the power that you would have with it, and all these kinds of technical details. I wasn't sure how we were going to cope with it.
"So we were pushing very, very hard to try to do everything to win the championship and to develop the car as much as we could, until the end.
"But the master plan did not have this included – to continue working on the 2008 car. It was very, very difficult because we thought we could do more than we did in the end."
