Death by Delage

More luckily still, when I discovered I would sit at the Governor’s table, I decided to smarten up and wear my new panama from the Adelaide Hatters.

The breakfast was fine. The announcement that I was the breakfast party’s sponsored guest of honour came as a surprise. So did the news that I was now expected to rise and deliver a twenty minute speech–in front of a camera!

If anybody in the audience had a Bugatti, I said, I’d be glad to hear from them.

I can’t remember much of what I said. I admired the gardens, the breakfast, the enticing appearance of the distant Adelaide hills. I praised the Adelaide Hatters. And then I had a brainwave.

Australia has a dry climate and salt isn’t used on the roads. It’s a very good place for vintage cars. Shifting my speech to the subject of Bugattis and the wonderful Hellé Nice, of whom I’d written a recent biography, I described my excitement at having been allowed to drive a couple of these gorgeous cars. If anybody in the audience had a Bugatti, I said, I’d be glad to hear from them.

And sure enough, back at the hotel, Antony Simpson had left me a message to come up to his family home in the Adelaide Hills and see his cars.

Antony and his wife have a wonderful old home, large, cool, and looking out across the city to the ocean. Antony, like many car-owners, has a wife who has gracefully agreed to share him with two beautiful rivals: a Bugatti 57, in perfect condition – and one of the only 99 D8S Delages ever to have been built. And, just for once, I found myself disloyally thinking that maybe, just maybe, the Delage was the more beautiful of the two.

Long, elegant, and the deep blue of the distant ocean, the Delage D8S had to be one of the loveliest cars I’d ever set eyes on. Just to slide into the driving-seat and lean back against the deep blue leather of its wide seat gave me the feeling of being a princess; the sound of the engine starting up was like the roar of a confident jungle beast. In fact, the only time I’d felt this good was when I was taken up the Prescott Hill Climb at 80 mph in a Bugatti Royale (so smooth that I couldn’t believe how fast we’d taken the steep corners).

I found myself disloyally thinking that maybe, just maybe, the Delage was the more beautiful of the two.

The Adelaide Hills are perfect for driving, high, wide roads with generous corners and smooth inclines: Antony Simpson knows every in and out of the route and – even though he wasn’t quite ready to put a perfect stranger behind the wheel of his favourite car – I felt blissful enough to wonder if Adelaide shouldn’t set up a car festival, a concours d’elegance and a hill climb, in the years that the city isn’t running book festivals.

Along the route, Antony told me one of his favourite Delage stories. In February 1932, Louis Delage decided to bring some English journalists over to France to compete in a 24 hour record breaking attempt, using the streamlined D8S, on the steep Montlhéry track. It was a freezing day and the drivers hadn’t prepared themselves for the fact that Delages were made for men of slightly shorter stature; riding around the bowl at 6.30 am with their heads sticking up over the scuttles, the Brits almost froze. Regardless, they drove on to set world records.

But what really thrilled me was the possibility that the car Antony Simpson owned could be the very one which Delage had persuaded twenty-year-old Renée Friderich to drive for him, in the Paris-Saint Raphael Rally in 1932.

The story was heartbreaking; Renée’s father, Ernst, was Ettore Bugatti’s right hand man; Renée had learned her skills from her father, driving the light, super-flexible cars that Bugatti was successfully marketing to women drivers. Taking a corner on the steep Pouges hill, Renée swung the Delage around as if it had been the smaller, lighter car that she knew – and lost control. ‘Pauvre petite Renée, toujours gaie, toujours souriante,’ L’Auto lamented, after a devastated Ernst Friderich had identified the twisted remains of his only child. (Hellé Nice, meanwhile, made the record time of the day, and the event, on that same treacherous stretch of road.)

Antony Simpson was good enough to indulge my romantic ideas. He probably knew, even back then, that the actual owner of Renée’s Delage had identified the car as hers by the damage to its panels. The history of his own machine wasn’t clear; only that it was one of the glorious 99 D8Ss that were built – not to make world records – but to dazzle.

Miranda Seymour’s books, including her latest “Chaplin’s Girl” can be ordered from:
Mirandaseymour.com.

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