Career
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 1929 he drove a Delage to 7th place in the Indianapolis 500.
He retired in 1938, and World 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 foundation And that the court has no record of such a case between 1949 and 1955.
His last race was In 1955, when he took a Lancia D50 to sixth place in the Monaco Grand Prix a few weeks before his 56th birthday, becoming the oldest driver to compete in a Formula One race. 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.
Major career victories
Belgian Grand Prix: 1930
Czechoslovakian Grand Prix: 1931, 1932, 1933
French Grand Prix: 1931, 1934, 1937, 1947, 1949 (Reims)
German Grand Prix: 1929
Italian Grand Prix: 1928
Spanish Grand Prix: 1928, 1929, 1933
Monaco Grand Prix: 1931
Moroccan Grand Prix: 1934
Grand Prix du Comminges: 1947
Grand Prix de Marseilles: 1933
Grand Prix de Nice: 1932
Spa 24 hours: 1933
Rome Grand Prix: 1928
Marne Grand Prix: 1928
Complete European Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position)
Complete Formula One World Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position)
Rally wins
Monte Carlo Rally - 1954
Chiron retired after 35 years in racing but maintained an executive role with the organizers of the Monaco Grand Prix, who honored him with a statue on the Grand Prix course and renamed the Swimming Pool corner after him.