Among the greatest drivers between the two World Wars, his career embraced over thirty years, starting in 1923,[1] and ending at the end of the 1950s. He is still the oldest driver ever to have started a race in the Formula One World Championship, having taken 6th place in the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix when he was 55.[2] Three years later he became the oldest driver to enter a Formula One race, at 58.[3] The Bugatti Chiron takes its name from him. Until 2024, when Charles Leclerc matched his achievement, he was the only Monegasque driver to have won the Monaco Grand Prix.
Early life and career
Coming from a family of wine-growers, Louis Chiron's father gained employment as a butler in the Hôtel de Paris at Monaco. As a teenager, Louis was employed as a bellboy at the hotel, and his interest in cars and racing started at that time. During World War I, he was seconded from an artillery regiment as a driver for Maréchal Pétain and Maréchal Foch, thanks to his persistence and a driving license financed by a Russian duchess he met at the hotel.[3][4]
Employed as a dancer after World War I, Chiron's racing career started in 1923, after a rich American woman he was friends with bought him a second hand Bugatti Brescia.[4][1] He started in local hillclimbs,[5] and moved to Grand Prix racing in 1926, after getting a Bugatti T35, and befriending rich industrialist Alfred Hoffman.[1] He won the Grand Prix du Comminges that year, at Saint-Gaudens, near Toulouse.[6]
Chiron's partnership with Hoffman ended in the early 1930s after he was found having an affair with his wife Alice. He was also fired from Bugatti's factory team at the end of 1932. He then founded with his friend Rudolf Caracciola a new team, called Scuderia CC. At the team's first race, the 1933 Monaco Grand Prix, Caracciola had a season ending accident, and Chiron switched to Alfa Romeo cars run by Scuderia Ferrari mid-season.[1] He won the 1933 Spa 24 hours race with specialist endurance racer Luigi Chinetti in an Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Monza.[8]
Chiron drove an Alfa Romeo P3 run by Ferrari for the 1934 Grand Prix season. He won the 1934 French Grand Prix at Montlhéry, against several works Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union entries, a race that is often considered one of the greatest victories of his career.[1][9] The Alfa Romeos struggled against the German cars in 1935, and Chiron only salvaged a podium at the 1935 Belgian Grand Prix and a minor victory at the Lorraine Grand Prix that year.[1]
Chiron moved to Mercedes-Benz's factory team for the 1936 Grand Prix season. He started the European championship campaign with a pole at his home race of Monaco, but his race ended after an accident on lap one. A more serious accident at the second round, the 1936 German Grand Prix, left him with head and shoulders injuries. He decided to retire from Grand Prix racing after that. He won the 1937 French Grand Prix, a race that was run for sports cars only that year.[1]
Chiron retired from racing in 1938,[1] and World War II curtailed motor racing a year later. When racing resumed after the War, he came out of retirement and drove a Talbot-Lago to victory in two French Grands Prix.[10]
According to a Los Angeles Times review of fellow driver Hellé Nice's biography, Chiron accused her, at a 1949 party in Monaco to celebrate the first postwar Monte Carlo Rally, of "collaborating with the Nazis". The review says biographer Miranda Seymour is "circumspect on Nice's guilt".[11] A review of the same book in The New York Times says Nice was accused of being a "Gestapo agent"; that Seymour "rebuts" the charge; and that it made Nice "unemployable".[12] Seymour's book says that in a letter to Antony Noghes, the head of the Monte Carlo Rally committee, Hellé Nice "protested her innocence"; that she told him she would appeal to the Monaco court unless Chiron wrote an apology; that no letter from Chiron has been found; and that the court has no record of such a case between 1949 and 1955.[13]
Chiron took part in the first ever Formula One World Championship season in 1950, as a factory Maserati driver.[2] At his home Grand Prix of Monaco he finished in third, at age 50,[14] the only points scoring finish of his career.[15]
Paired with the Swiss driver Ciro Basadonna, Chiron won the 1954 Monte Carlo Rally. His last race was in 1955,[16] when he took a Lancia D50 to sixth place in the Monaco Grand Prix a few weeks before his 56th birthday,[17] becoming the oldest driver to compete in a Formula One race.[16] He is also the oldest driver ever to have entered for a Formula One race, taking part in practice for the 1958 Monaco Grand Prix when he was 58.[2]
Later life and legacy
Chiron retired after 35 years in racing but maintained an executive role with the organizers of the Monaco Grand Prix, who honoured him with a statue on the Grand Prix course and renamed the Swimming Pool corner after him.[18] As he had achieved the greatest number of podium finishes in Bugattis, the 1999 Bugatti 18/3 Chiron concept car and the 2016 Bugatti Chiron are named in his honour.[19][20]
Louis Chiron was so popular in Czechoslovakia, whose Grand Prix he won three consecutive times, that even after 75 years his name still lives in a popular saying "He drives like Chiron", used mainly when referring to speeding motorists or generally to people who drive very quickly.[18]
