Louis Chiron

Louis Chiron

Chiron in Montlhéry in 1927
Born	Louis Alexandre Chiron (1899-08-03)3 August 1899 Monte Carlo, Monaco
Died	22 June 1979(1979-06-22) (aged 79) Monte Carlo, Monaco
Formula One World Championship career
Nationality	Monégasque
Active years	1950–1951, 1953, 1955–1956, 1958
Teams	Maserati Ecurie Rosier Private Lancia Scuderia Centro Sud
Entries	19 (15 starts)
Championships	0
Wins	0
Podiums	1
Career points	4
Pole positions	0
Fastest laps	0
First entry	1950 British Grand Prix
Last entry	1958 Monaco Grand Prix
24 Hours of Le Mans career Participating years 1928–1929, 1931–1933, 1937–1938, 1951, 1953 Teams Private C.T. Weymann Equipe Bugatti Guy Bouriat Capt. G.E.T. Eyston Luigi Chinetti Ecurie Bleue Scuderia Lancia Best finish dnf (1928, 1929, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1937, 1938, 1951, 1953) Class wins 0

Louis Alexandre Chiron (3 August 1899 – 22 June 1979) was a Monégasque racing driver who competed in rallies, sports car races, and Grands Prix. He is the oldest driver ever to have raced in Formula One, having taken 6th place in the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix when he was 55.

Louis Chiron fell in love with cars and racing when he was a teenager. He started driving in Grand Prix races after World War I, in which he was seconded from an artillery regiment as a driver for Maréchal Pétain and Maréchal Foch.

In 1926 he won his first local race, the Grand Prix de Comminges, at Saint-Gaudens, near Toulouse, and went on to drive a Bugatti and an Alfa Romeo P3 to victories in the Marseille Grand Prix, the Circuit of Masaryk, and the Spanish Grand Prix. In 1929 he drove a Delage to 7th place in the Indianapolis 500. He won the 1931 Monaco Grand Prix—the only Monaco-born driver to have done so—and in 1933 he partnered with specialist endurance racer Luigi Chinetti to win the Spa 24 hours race.

He retired in 1938, 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.

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”. 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". 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.