Max
Chilton

Max Chilton was born in Redhill on 21 April 1991. He began karting at the age of ten and turned to car racing at fourteen. In the T Cars championship he finished runner-up to Luciano Bacheta in 2006, three points behind, despite winning seven races to Bacheta's six. His brother Tom is also a racing driver. He made his British Formula 3 debut in 2007 and finished tenth in the championship with Hitech Racing in 2008. In 2009 he won twice for Carlin, at Portimão and at Brands Hatch.

In GP2 he drove for Ocean Racing Technology in 2010 and for Carlin in 2011. In 2012 he finished fourth overall with Carlin, taking his first pole position and win in the series in Hungary. In the second half of 2012 he was Marussia's test and reserve driver.

Chilton got a full-time seat with Marussia in 2013. He qualified twentieth on his debut in Australia and recorded his best result of the year with fourteenth place in Monaco. He is the only driver to have finished every race of his rookie season, all 19 of them, and he ended the year 23rd in the championship. He stayed with Marussia in 2014 and finished thirteenth in Australia and again in Bahrain. In Canada he retired after a first-lap collision with team-mate Jules Bianchi, which ended a run of 25 consecutive finishes, and he took a three-place grid penalty at the next race. When Marussia stopped operating, he missed the final three races. He finished 21st in the championship and made 35 starts in total.

He then helped Carlin with their Indy Lights programme and won there from pole position, on the same weekend that Bianchi died. He dedicated the win to his former team-mate. In 2015 he raced for Nissan in the World Endurance Championship and retired from the 24 Hours of Le Mans after 234 laps with a suspension failure. From 2016 to 2021 he drove in the IndyCar Series, first for Chip Ganassi Racing and from 2018 for Carlin. In the 2017 Indianapolis 500 he led the most laps, 50 in total, and finished fourth. In June 2019 it was announced that he would contest only the Indy 500 on oval circuits from then on. In February 2022 he announced his retirement from IndyCar. That year he also set a hillclimb record at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the McMurtry Spéirling.

Source: Wikipedia, “Max Chilton”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.