A PRINCESS OF SPEED

Hellé Nice. A nice name to designate the one who was a great racing car driver in the 1920s, completely forgotten today. An absence that Giuseppe Manunta repairs with this beautiful drawn biography.

Pup and Bocquet in their biographies have the will to highlight what they call the ” clandestine history That is to say, women, and there are many of them, who were recognized in their time, but whose traces have gradually faded in the history written by men.

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It is another clandestine that evokes Giuseppe Manunta in his comic ” Hellé Nice “Whose name is even more discreet than that ofOlympe de Gouges Where Kiki de Montparnasse. If the patronymic ofHellé Nice don’t tell you anything, Mariette Hélène Delangle won’t talk to you anymore.

It is the cover of the album that will give an indication: a pin-up like the one dear to the aviators designed by Romain Hugault (1), but also the flight of an airplane, the bodywork of a racing car from the 1930s, all forming a symbolic image of a woman with an explosive character. Added to this is a speed, 197.2 km / h, that achieved on a circuit by car, but which could qualify the life of the one that was successively, but also simultaneously, ” muse of a painter, dancer, stripper, adventurer »And also lover, mistress, seductress, who will travel and pilot his cars from Algeria to Brazil, from Monaco to the United States.

These lovers are called Arnaldo, René, Philippe, but also Bugatti, Alfa Romeo because, as much as the men, Hellé likes racing cars, so physically demanding at the time and for which you have to strengthen your shoulders, chest and have arms like ” rushes, flexible, but robust ».

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Giuseppe Manunta give it to their heart’s content in a design responsible for transmitting speed, speed on the track, existential speed, and to reveal bodies as well as engines. Taking advantage of the full pages which are so many pit stops, he makes us discover from the inside the environment of this booming automotive world and the key figures, industrialists in particular, who engage, through the races, a formidable commercial competition. Hellé Nice (pronounce ” She is nice »To fully understand the meaning of the nickname), born in a modest environment in 1900, crosses these universes without worrying about notoriety, good manners or conventions.

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She leads her life like her Bugatti, at full speed, avoiding obstacles, but also sometimes taking them head-on, bordering on death. On June 2, 1929, she won her first women’s Grand Prix race at the Linas-Montlhéry autodrome before turning at a speed of 194 km / h six months later.

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Burning life sometimes leads to burnt wings: an accident, a shameless accusation of collaborating with the Nazis during WWII, a companion who empties her bank accounts, a mother who disinherits her for her immoral behavior, a beauty which fades and the race ends in 1984 in ” loneliness, misery and oblivion »Despite the help of an association which helps artists in difficulty and whose name sends an authentic nod to the destiny of Hellé Nice : The wheel spins.

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No one is a prophet in his country and it will take an Englishwoman, Miranda Seymour, to go out Hellé Nice oblivion with the publication in 2004 of a biography edited in the United Kingdom, then published in the United States and translated into Spanish, but for the moment not in French. One wonders when reading this beautiful album if the world of motor racing has not regressed in terms of diversity, while driving Formula 1 today requires much less physical power.

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In his afterword, Georges Bringuier, biographer of Hellé Nice (2) notes that no ” regulation does not prohibit the participation of women and no physical or technical argument is admissible »In Formula 1. As the 2021 season has just ended this Sunday, we cannot help but think at the start of the Barheïn Grand Prix in March 2022 that it would be good for a woman to be one day again at the start. For the memory of Mariette Hélène Delangle especially. And for all the others.