Olivier Chandon de Brailles
French racing driver (1955–1983)
Olivier Hervé Horace Chandon de Brailles (17 September 1955 – 2 March 1983), also called Olivier Chandon, Oliver Chandon de Briailles, and Olivier Chandon Debrailles, was a French race car driver, heir to the Moët et Chandon champagne, and one-time boyfriend of the American model Christie Brinkley.
Biography
Olivier Chandon de Brailles was the only son of Frederic Chandon de Brailles, chairman of the Moët-Hennessy group and heir to the Moët & Chandon champagne fortune.
Chandon spoke five languages, had a second degree black belt in Taekwondo, and was a race car driver and skydiver.
A graduate of Le Rosey in Switzerland, he served in the French Air Force and later moved to New York City. There he attended New York University to study marketing and worked in the sales department of United Technologies. Earlier, he began racing cars in Europe at age 18, whereby he assumed the shortened name of Olivier Chandon. He later resumed his race car career in the United States.
On 2 March 1983, Chandon, a member of the New York-based Fred Opert Racing Team, was killed while driving a Ralt race car in a private practice session at Moroso Motorsports Park in West Palm Beach, Florida, while preparing for the upcoming Formula Atlantic season. While in New York Chandon lived in the Chelsea Hotel.
Travelling over 100 miles per hour, Chandon's vehicle crashed through a barrier, fell into a canal and landed upside down, where he was pinned in his car at the feet and drowned in an otherwise survivable accident.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Olivier Chandon de Brailles” is french racing driver (1955–1983). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Olivier, Chandon and Brailles, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7088136. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1955 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Olivier Chandon de Brailles” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.