Pastor Maldonado

Interesting facts

Maldonado was already winning BMX national titles in Venezuela at age four, before discovering motorsport in 1992 at the Carmencita Hernández kart track, fascinated by the vehicles racing around it. In 2010 he won the GP2 championship with a record ten race victories - including six in a row from Istanbul Park to Spa - finishing 16 points clear of Sergio Pérez. His only Formula 1 victory came at the 2012 Spanish Grand Prix for Williams: promoted to pole after Hamilton's exclusion, he led the race from the front and held off Alonso and Räikkönen to become the first Venezuelan winner in the sport's history. Much of his career was underwritten by sponsorship from Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA, funding that had also been key to securing his Williams seat in the first place. A long string of on-track incidents earned him the nickname 'Crashtor'; after a 2015 Singapore collision, world champion Jenson Button remarked, 'I should have known, he's mental.' He lost his F1 seat when Renault's takeover of Lotus collided with problems around the PDVSA sponsorship for 2016, with Kevin Magnussen taking his place, and he continued racing as a Pirelli test driver and later in endurance racing with DragonSpeed. Pastor Maldonado made his Formula 1 debut in 2011 and raced until 2015, 5 seasons in total as a Venezuelan driver. He scored a total of 76 championship points over his career. His best season was 2015, when he finished 14th in the championship with 27 points.