Maurice
Trintignant

Maurice Trintignant was born on 30 October 1917 in Sainte-Cécile-les-Vignes, France. He began racing in 1938 and won the Grand Prix des Frontières in 1939, before the Second World War interrupted his career. In 1948 he was involved in a serious crash during a support race for the Swiss Grand Prix. He was back in competition in 1949 and won a Formula Two race at the Circuit des Remparts that year.

When the Formula One World Championship began in 1950, he was given a works drive with Gordini. He competed in every season up to and including 1964, making 82 starts and taking nine podium finishes. He never took a pole position. His two wins both came at the Monaco Grand Prix, in 1955 and 1958. He started from ninth on the grid in 1955 and from fifth in 1958. In 1958 he was driving a Cooper T45.

He finished fourth in the World Championship in both 1954 and 1955, each time with Ferrari. In Formula One he drove cars from eleven different manufacturers, a record, racing for both works teams and private entries. At the 1956 French Grand Prix he drove the Bugatti Type 251, making him the last driver to represent the marque in a Grand Prix. In his final season, 1964, he finished fifth in the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring in his own BRM P57. Outside Formula One, he won the 1954 24 Hours of Le Mans with José Froilán González in a Ferrari 375 Plus.

After his racing career he worked as a winemaker in the Languedoc-Roussillon region. In 2000 he took part in the Historic Grand Prix of Monaco in the Cooper T45 in which he had won there in 1958. Maurice Trintignant died on 13 February 2005, aged 87.

Source: Wikipedia, “Maurice Trintignant”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.