BY CARLO WOLFF

Helene Delangle lived fast and died old and penniless, the target of an unproven accusation that she was a Nazi collaborator. Delangle, better known as a race car driver who used the name Helle Nice (try "Hell on Ice" or "Elle est Nice" for association), expired while stewing in her fading memories as the toast of several continents and the person who made Bugatti cars famous in the 1920s. In several ways, she evokes her contemporary Josephine Baker, another "bad girl" who made good, against the odds, in a glamorous world.

Delangle is the complicated, sad heroine of Bugatti Queen, Miranda Seymour's probe of a fast life and faster times. Seymour's "creative reconstruction" of a shadowy existence, this biography aims to cast light on a woman who once was "the champion of the world" and is a fitting subject for the biographer of Robert Graves, Henry James and Ottoline Morrell, the Bloomsbury doyenne.

Born in rural France into a dysfunctional petit-bourgeois family, Delangle fled to Paris in her teens, eagerly embracing the postwar demimonde and making a name for herself as a beauty ready to plaster her image (and body) onto postcards (and lovers). Before she became a race car driver, she was a dancer. In the mid-'20s, Delangle joined Robert Lizet in dance performances that showcased her looks and his taste:

"Lizet had chosen his program with care, blending art with titillation. The music — a Chopin nocturne, a Brahms waltz, a dark and moody composition by Massenet followed by a frothy operetta song — was just original enough to make the audience feel clever for recognizing it. The numbers, all with a classical theme, were based upon celebrated dance models. The costumes, although scanty, were rich with texture, scraps of velvet and gauze which sparkled with bright beads of colored glass. Nudity, as Lizet explained to his new dancing partner, was vulgar only if one went in for the fruit-and-feather look, like the capering La Baker and her banana skirt; nakedness, at the upper end of the market which they aimed to please, was softly lit and always in the best of taste."

More than just a flapper, Delangle was a bohemian. Joyously promiscuous, unremittingly sensual, she was an early feminist whose beauty made her a natural for dancing and whose fearlessness made her a natural for car racing. It was only in later life, when she began to lose her attractiveness and commercial clout, that the self-loathing that also drove her came to the fore.

But pleasure, more than sorrow, dominates this celebration of velocity in lifestyle and on the track. For most of her life, Delangle personified adrenaline and intoxication, living on the edge and reveling in audacity. This was one tough cookie: Not only did she survive several accidents — one in Sao Paulo in 1936 nearly killed her — Delangle came back stronger, even more eager to prove herself in a dangerous, male-dominated world.