Scott
Speed

Scott Speed was born on 24 January 1983 in Manteca, California. He began karting at the age of ten and stayed in the sport until 2001, the year he moved into single-seaters and won the US Formula Russell title. In 2003 he raced for Alan Docking Racing in British Formula Three after winning the Red Bull Driver Search programme. In 2004 he took both the Formula Renault 2000 Eurocup and the German Formula Renault 2000 championship. In the inaugural GP2 season in 2005 he drove for iSport International and finished third overall, behind Nico Rosberg and Heikki Kovalainen.

In 2005 he was a test driver for Red Bull Racing at the Canadian and United States Grands Prix. In Canada this made him the first American at a Formula One event since Michael Andretti in 1993. In 2006 Red Bull entered the new Scuderia Toro Rosso team, with Speed and Vitantonio Liuzzi as its drivers. He finished 13th on his debut at the Bahrain Grand Prix. At the United States Grand Prix he was caught up in a first-lap collision, and Liuzzi scored the team's first championship point in that race. Speed started 18 races in 2006 and ended the year 20th in the standings.

He stayed with Toro Rosso in 2007. His best result of the season was ninth at Monaco, after starting 18th. The European Grand Prix was his last race for the team, and Sebastian Vettel replaced him before the Hungarian Grand Prix. He started ten races that year and finished 21st in the championship, ending his Formula One career with 28 starts.

After Formula One he raced in the United States. In 2008 he drove a full ARCA season for Eddie Sharp Racing, winning four races and finishing fifth in the standings. That year he won a NASCAR Truck Series race at Dover and made his Cup Series debut at Martinsville in October. He raced in the Cup Series for Red Bull, Whitney Motorsports and Leavine Family Racing, and his best result with Red Bull was fifth at Talladega in 2009.

From 2013 he competed in rallycross, winning gold at the X Games in his very first rallycross race. With Andretti Autosport he won the Global RallyCross Championship in 2015, 2016 and 2017, and the Americas Rallycross Championship in 2018. In 2021 he was runner-up in the Nitro Rallycross Championship for Subaru. In Formula E he finished second in Miami in 2015, standing in for Andretti Autosport.

Source: Wikipedia, “Scott Speed”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.