Robert Kubica has become a winner more than a decade on from the career-changing crash that he was lucky to survive. The Polish former racer, alongside team-mates Yifei Ye and Britain's Phil Hanson, won the world-famous 24-hour race for the first time on Sunday.

made his name racing in F1 and won the 2008 near the beginning of what promised to be a fine career. He had impressed with BMW Sauber to the point he was set to land a coveted race seat with .

But that all changed in early 2011 with a crash while rallying which almost killed him. He survived, but needed a partial amputation to his right forearm and suffered other very serious injuries which forced him to spend months recovering and rehabilitating.

In an interview last year, Kubica revealed he broke 42 bones and lost three quarters of his blood volume. He said: "I was in Valencia for pre-season testing when I was offered to race in the Renault rally car. Initially I accepted but then I called to say, 'Forget it', but they replied that Pirelli was already bringing tyres, the road was already blocked for testing.

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"Honestly, I remember little of what happened because I was in a coma for so long. I arrived at the hospital with one and a half litres of blood, whereas a human body has six or seven. The right side of my body was all smashed up. I had 42 fractures and from my toe to my elbow I was all broken.

"I am human. For six or seven months I lost all feeling and I was not moving anything. I was trying to move my finger, but I could do it and it was a feeling that only those who have experienced it can understand. The day I succeeded, I felt an absurd joy."

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Crucially, though, he survived and even made an F1 comeback in 2019 with where he was team-mate to a young . He has since gone on to race in the World Endurance Championship and won the title in 2023.

But the series' showpiece event, the 24-hour race at Le Mans, had eluded him until Sunday when he, Hanson and Ye took victory in the #83 AF Corse Ferrari 499P. It marks the 12th time Ferrari have taken the overall victory at Le Mans, while Kubica and Ye are the first Polish and Chinese drivers respectively to win the famous race.

As a result of that success, Kubica is now one of only two men this century to have won both Le Mans and an F1 race. The other is , the two-time F1 champion who also won at Le Mans twice during his career break after leaving in 2018 and 2019.

All three Ferrari entries had struggled in qualifying for this year's edition of the 24-hour race. But it became clear early on that they had the superior race pace in the field and Kubica and his team-mates took the win from the #6 Porsche Penske entry.