Le Mans winner Robert Kubica admits Ferrari team order led to “unnecessary risk”

Newly-crowned 24 Hours of Le Mans winner Robert Kubica admits that Ferrari’s decision to impose team orders between its three Hypercar entries caused him a “lot more stress” and forced him to take “unnecessary” risk.

Kubica, Yifei Ye and Phil Hanson won the 93rd edition of the French endurance classic in AF Corse’s customer No. 83 Ferrari 499P, beating the No. 6 Porsche of Kevin Este, Laurens Vanthoor and Matt Campbell by 10 seconds.

The No. 83 Ferrari and the two factory cars occupied the top three positions for large chunks of the race, prompting the Prancing Horse to mediate the race through means of team orders.

The whole situation caused a lot of frustration for Kubica, who was heard saying he "respected the orders twice" over team radio.

Ultimately, a combination of fewer mistakes and superior reliability allowed Kubica and his teammates to score a maiden win at Le Mans, while the two factory cars finished third and fourth after running into mechanical issues late on.

Speaking afterwards, Kubica admitted that team orders compromised the race for the No. 83 crew, but was happy to still come away with a fine victory.

“It's never easy,” Kubica told Crash.net after the race. “We did play the team player role, us from the 83. We tried to help where we could, but I felt like we shouldn't be in that position—especially as we had more pace.

“ We tried to help where we could, but I felt like we shouldn't be there in that position, especially that we had more pace. Being stuck behind the other car, you are just destroying your tyres and losing performance.

“So to be honest, when you see the gap to Porsche, it was correct to push and we couldn't. so you never know in Le Mans. It's better to have a 40-second advantage than three seconds. It makes your life easier and it was not nice, to be honest.

“ I don't want to get too much into the details, but somehow I understand that everyone is trying to do for themselves. 

“But there are kind of respect things and once there is a call that we are not racing each other and then you see the other car overtaking your teammates and then don’t give back position and then for many, many hours, we were chasing because of that. 

“So finally it didn't change the final result fortunately, but it definitely put much more stress and much more risk, sometimes unnecessary risk.”

It’s an open secret that Kubica had signed a deal to race for Ferrari in Formula 1 from 2012, only for a rally crash in early part of 2011 to change the course of his career.

Asked if Sunday’s win helped lay that chapter to rest and heal old wounds, Kubica replied: “What happened many, many years ago with my accident when I had signed already for Ferrari will never come back, but I accepted that.

“In the end I will not be here if I would not..... maybe not fully healed, but still for many, many years there were moments where you were living with some kind of ‘what if?’].

“Finally I managed to move forward. I started racing back. I started looking forward and when I came for the first time here in Le Mans in 2021, I felt like a small child discovering new events, new racing, something which gave me a really nice feeling like when I was racing karting back there many, many years ago. 

“So then I knew my objective, my goal was to one day win, to try to win. There's no guarantee. That year I lost a win on the last lap, OK, in LMP2 category, but it was still very competitive. So happy to win it in hypercar.”