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.”
Helle Nice Bugatti Helle Nice Car
Click here to read on: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/executive-living/motoring/rich-legacy-digging-the-racing-queen/story-fngmee2f-1227010483758
