🏎️0️⃣4️⃣7️⃣ Hélène “Hellé Nice” Delangle
Meet Hélène Delangle, aka “Hellé Nice,” a global sports celebrity who set speed records during her career-long quest to compete on equal terms with male counterparts on auto racing circuits from Europe and North Africa to the Americas.
Born December 1900 in Aunay-sous-Auneau, a small village near Chartres, France, Delangle was the middle child of the town’s postmaster. Always a tomboy, she enjoyed calisthenics and athletics as a schoolgirl, and developed a lifelong passion for reading and drawing. After the First World War, she moved to Paris and embarked on a stage career performing in the capital’s music halls under the stage name “Hellé Nice.”
The adrenaline junkie, whose interests included alpine skiing, hiking, and mountaineering, learned to race automobiles and increasingly fed that passion. She set a world speed record for a female driver, pilot, in December 1929 at the Montlhéry racetrack of 160 miles/hour (197.7 km/hr). Her car of choice, and the one she set that record in, was a Bugatti, thanks to a longtime partnership with the automaker that elevated both Hellé Nice and the car brand worldwide.
Hellé Nice’s second career as a racecar driver spanned several continents, making her one of the first widely mediatized female sports celebrities. Quick reflexes behind the wheel and an uncanny understanding of marketing helped, as did her alleged beauty. But more notable was how she continuously fought to race against male competitors on equal footing, to break away from the female-only circuits.
The Context
Sports were increasingly part of a modern feminine domain in the 1920s, but autoracing remained a masculine domain. This was particularly true in France, where societal views of feminine physical culture and beauty focused on calisthenics, dance, and swimming–which all helped prepare the body for childbearing– less on the strength and daring required on race circuits. Helle Nice thus flaunted conventions, even as she used her looks to her advantage in marketing. As historian Richard Holt documents, the sportscape in France of the Interwar era was also a predominantly masculine one; while pioneers like Alice Milliat created opportunities and space for women to participate and compete in sports, it was still a battle.
Yet, Hellé Nice broke conventions. Her racing career included competitions in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere in Europe, North Africa, Brazil, and North America.
The Sports Diplomacy Connection
In 1930, she raced in different parts of the United States, including the dirt track circuit in Woodbridge, New Jersey, where as an informal representative of France, she communicated, represented, and negotiated to an American public what it could mean to be female, French, and a speed champion. As the South Bend News-Times (South Bend, Indiana) noted in its March 23, 1930 edition,
“When it comes to speed, Mlle. Helle Nice of France has something all the women can shoot after.”
She suffered a near-fatal racing crash in Sao Paulo in the late 1930s that sidelined her temporarily. She returned to the cockpit in the immediate post-war era but her comeback didn’t go as planned and halted in January 1949 as rumors of her wartime collaboration with the Occupation regime made her persona non grata. Hellé Nice never raced again. She spent her last decades forgotten to the public record and died in 1984.
Mapping the Connection
From Aunay-sous-Auneau, France to Woodbridge, New Jersey
Further Reading
[F] Radio France, “Hellé Nice, l'incroyable destin d'une pilote automobile d'avant-garde,” June 24, 2020.
[E] Ben Sutherland, “Helle Nice: The incredible life story of the first Women's Grand Prix winner,” BBC Sport, October 10, 2018.
[E] Miranda Seymour, The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend, (Pocket Books, 2004).
How to Cite This Entry
Krasnoff, Lindsay . “Voices: Hélène ‘Hellé Nice’ Delangle,” FranceAndUS, https://www.franceussports.com/voices/048-hlne-hell-nice-delangle. (date of consultation).