Former Formula 1 driver Pastor Maldonado makes his WEC debut at Spa-Francorchamps this weekend.
Maldonado, a Grand Prix winner with Williams in 2012, had a largely nondescript F1 career overall, gaining a reputation as being fast but wild. His involvement in several controversial incidents with other drivers, as well as a crash rate above the average, meant that he struggled to land a seat for 2016 when Renault bought out the Lotus team when Maldonado was a contracted driver. With Renault aiming to return to the front, and with Maldonado’s money source drying up as Venezuela’s economy crumbled, he has sat on the sidelines since then, although publicly never gave up on a return to F1.
With that possibility becoming more and more unlikely, he has turned to the World Endurance Championship for 2018. While former F1 contemporaries like Fernando Alonso, Jenson Button and Vitaly Petrov will race in the LMP1 class this year, Maldonado will be in the tier below that, LMP2, racing for Dragonspeed.
He teams up with Roberto Gonzalez Valdez, a former Cart & Champcar racer, and Nathanael Berthon, a now experienced sportscar racer in WEC & ELMS.
