Helle Nice – The Forgotten One: 15th December 1900 – 1st October 1984

Born Mariette Helene Delangle, Helle Nice was a pioneer. Not only “a female racing driver” but a female racing driver during one of the most brutal and most demanding eras; that legendary decade, the 1930s. Helle had always loved speed and automobiles and realised her ambition when she entered five Grands Prix on the French national scene in 1931 in a Bugatti Type 35C and would also drive Alfa Romeos in her career in the European Championship.

Helle Nice and her 1931 Bugatti

Not only a crowd drawer because of her good looks (she had been a dancer and model earlier in her life), she was multi-disciplined, competing in top level rallies and hillclimbs. She was probably one of the first racing drivers to turn to advertisements and endorsements; her popularity and instant fame in the bright blue car saw her supplement her income with companies queuing up to have her endorse their products and wares.Her racing career nearly ended in 1936 after a horrific crash in the Sao Paolo Grand Prix left 6 spectators dead, saw her in a coma for three days and out of action for nearly two years. She attempted to return to top level Grand Prix racing in 1939 in a Bugatti but the onset of World War Two ended those hopes.Although she did not win any top level Grands Prix outright, she was a genuine competitor who raced on merit and was respected for just that.Sadly, her story takes a bad turn. Why is she forgotten? Well, at the 1949 Monte Carlo Rally, the first post-war Monte Carlo Rally, she was scheduled to take part when Louis Chiron, the famed Monegasque racing driver himself, strode across the room at an event party and began making flagrant accusations that Nice had collaborated with the Nazis during World War Two. His clout was so strong that she was immediately dropped by her sponsors and never raced again despite the rumours being completely and comprehensively untrue. The lasting irony being that Louis Chiron had driven for the Nazi funded Mercedes-Benz team in the 1930s at a time when Nice’s close confidant Rene Dreyfus was disqualified from doing so because of his Jewish heritage.Her final years make for a heartbreaking tale:

One of the 20th Century’s most colorful and illustrious pioneering women who had successfully competed in more than seventy events at the highest echelon of automobile racing, spent her final years in a sordid rat-infested apartment in the back alleys of the city of Nice, living under a fictitious name to hide her shame. Estranged from her family for years, she died penniless, friendless, and completely forgotten by the rich and glamorous crowd involved in Grand Prix motor racing.