Pastor
Maldonado

Pastor Maldonado was born on 9 March 1985 in Maracay, Venezuela. He began BMX racing at the age of four and won a national title. From 1993 he entered karting championships. In 2003 he moved to Italy to race in Formula Renault and finished seventh. The following year he won the Italian Formula Renault title with Cram Competition, taking eight victories, and also placed eighth in the Formula Renault Eurocup. In 2006 he finished third overall in Formula Renault 3.5 with Draco Racing.

In GP2 he won at Monaco for Trident Racing in 2007, only his fourth race in the series. He took fifth place in the 2008 standings with Piquet Sports and sixth in 2009 with ART Grand Prix. In 2010 he won the title with Rapax, 16 points ahead of Sergio Pérez. His ten race wins in GP2 are a series record.

Maldonado joined Williams for 2011. He scored his first world championship point with tenth place in Belgium and ended the year 19th. At the 2012 Spanish Grand Prix he started from pole position after Lewis Hamilton was excluded from qualifying, and went on to win ahead of Fernando Alonso and Kimi Räikkönen. He was the first Venezuelan to stand on a Grand Prix podium. He qualified second in Singapore and finished the season 15th with 45 points. In 2013 he raced alongside Valtteri Bottas and ended the year 18th.

For 2014 Maldonado moved to Lotus, with Romain Grosjean as his team-mate. He scored only once, with ninth place in the United States, and was 16th in the championship. In 2015 he finished 14th with 27 points, which remained his best championship position. For 2016 Kevin Magnussen took the seat at the team, by then run by Renault. In total Maldonado started 95 races, with one win, one podium and one pole position.

In 2017 he worked as a Pirelli test driver. In 2018 and 2019 he raced in the World Endurance Championship in the LMP2 class with DragonSpeed, finishing third in the class standings. In 2019 he won the LMP2 class at the 24 Hours of Daytona with the team.

Source: Wikipedia, “Pastor Maldonado”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.