Aston Martin chief Mike Krack snubbed the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher to name Robert Kubica as "the best I've ever seen".
The Pole has long been a popular figure among Formula 1 fans, having emerged as an unlikely title contender during the 2008 season. He had a brilliant year with BMW-Sauber and won the Canadian Grand Prix to lead Hamilton and Felipe Massa in the standings.
Kubica ended up finishing fourth, but was just 23 points off eventual champion Hamilton. BMW faded the following year but a move to Renault in 2010 saw the return of better results.
Had it not been for a horrific crash while rallying in early 2011, he might have gone on to be one of the most successful drivers of his generation. But the Pole was out of the sport for many years until the uncompetitive Williams team gave him a seat in 2019.
Ever since, he has been a test and reserve driver with Alfa Romeo – the current guise of the Sauber team. Aston team principal Krack was chief engineer with BMW while Kubica was a driver, so knows the 37-year-old well.
And the Luxembourger is so confident about Kubica's natural ability, he named the Pole as "the best one I've ever seen". He told the Beyond the Grid podcast: "From a pure talent, I think how he has a feeling in describing the car, I think he is really, really, really strong.
Krack even believes Kubica might have won the title in 2008 had BMW not decided to halt upgrades for their car to start work on their 2009 machine. It was a decision that led to both driver and engineer quitting down the road.
"You remember that I left [in 2009]? There is a link there," he added. "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."
