Rich legacy digging the racing queen

THE morphine, champagne and sex she had the previous night made Helle Nice disinclined to drive in the 1929 Women’s Grand Prix.

FEE APPLIES...ONE TIME USE... UNSPECIFIED : Helle Nice (Mariette Helene Delangle, 1900-1984) french model, dancer and Grand Prix motor racing driver, here in Montlhery on december 18, 1929 driving a Bugatti 35 C (Photo by Apic/Getty Images) Fee applies, single use, must credit Picture: Images Getty

BEFORE winning the 1929 Women’s Grand Prix, Helle Nice did what most of us do before a big race. As her biographer Miranda Seymour tells it, “she reached the track with half an hour to go, wishing she hadn’t spent the night before dancing at Les Acasias. A mixture of morphine, champagne and sex had left her wanting to crawl into a coalhole when she woke up.”

None of this slowed the 29-year-old exotic dancer: she won the main 50km event from the back of the grid, becoming the fastest woman on earth circling the very dangerous Montlhery track at 198km/h, then backed up to win the 150km race. How good are champagne and sex?

It’s 30 years since Helle, one of the best known women racers of her time, died a pauper. This month Dave Gooding is selling her 1927 Bugatti Type 35B Grand Prix at Pebble Beach in California. Miranda Seymour’s 2004 book on Helle, The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend, is available now only through Amazon UK, but is an extraordinary story that deserves to be a movie.

This was a time when, as Seymour told me, “women were able to race against men as equals … She brought to the track her own determination, perseverance and considerable skill.”

It was also a time when racers and fans expected fatalities. Drivers died and sometimes killed fans when they did. Women racers asked no quarter from men. A small town postman’s daughter, Helle Nice, saw her first race at three. In the field was Ettore Bugatti, who, 27 years later, was to sell her his Type 35b for $1600. The beautiful Helle moved to Paris where she became famous as a dancer, model and attractor of wealthy men. Sex appeal and skill made her an international star. She beat male racers in her six grand prix starts, hill climbs and rallies. Her US fans called her Hellish Nice, her rivals Hell On Ice.

On the last lap of the 1936 Sao Paulo Grand Prix, Helle was second when she crashed. Her Alfa Romeo somersaulted twice and rammed into the main stand at 160km/h. Thrown from the car, she speared into a soldier, saving her but killing him. The car killed four spectators, injured more than 30 others and put her in a coma for three days.

Her life was changed forever. She planned to make a comeback in the 1949 Monte Carlo Rally but a rejected suitor, GP racer Louis Chiron, wrongly denounced her as a Nazi agent. She never recovered, dying in an unheated room having lived on charity. After her death even her sister Solange refused to let her ashes be buried next to her family in Dourdan.

Seymour felt so strongly about the hell Helle suffered for her last 30 years that she arranged “for Helle Nice to be buried alongside her family … She is now truly honoured there, with a handsome plaque recording her triumphs for France”.

In 1983 US collector Ben Rose bought Helle’s Bugatti for $130,000. He told the New York Times he got it up to 152km/h “but my foot began to shake so bad, out of fear’’. Helle drove it at close to 200km/h. In 1997, Christie’s sold it to New Jersey’s Oscar Davis who passed it to basketballer Brian Brunkhorst. Helle’s blue car which, as Seymour says, “was customised for HN by Ettore Bugatti, and for which she was required to pay, is one of the jewels of the racing world”. Unlike most jewels, this very noisy one will cost you at least $3.5 million.

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