Delangle did cut it close. Here, Seymour reconstructs a night in 1929, just before she was to compete in the Grand Prix Feminin behind the wheel of an Omega Six:

"Publicly, her confidence was unassailable; alone, she was scared. What if she failed? Late at night, in the quiet hours, she sat on a kitchen chair, cold cream smeared on her cheeks and neck, a cigarette clenched between her teeth. She narrowed her eyes until she could see the circuit, brace her body against each jolt of broken surface under the tires, tighten her fists and wrench the wheel until her shoulders ached, hold it here, hard, until she was safely around the bend, moving along the straight. Take rest, her friends told her; it's not doing you good. And then she'd weaken and go drinking and come back with a handsome boy and she'd forget the irritation of his snuffles and snores as she lay wide-eyed in the darkness before dawn, listening for the rising whine of an engine, waiting for the wind to thump a fist against her face."

Delangle won that race. She continued to win races through the 1930s and didn't quit until 1951, when she dropped out of one in Nice, where she and her last lover, the handsome wastrel Arnaldo Binelli (yet another mechanic Delangle took to her bed), lived during the Nazi occupation.

Delangle never could dispel or disprove the accusation of Louis Chiron, a Monte Carlo race car driver, that she had been a Nazi collaborator. Nevertheless, Seymour suggests, defending a subject she clearly loves, the charge stemmed from Chiron's jealousy: Delangle upstaged him at various '30s races, both in beauty and prowess. Hammered by Chiron's allegation, poleaxed by Binelli's abandonment, she spent her final years in Nice in a cheerless apartment, where she died in September 1984.

Delangle's life would have gone undocumented were it not for the purchase of a sports clipping album by Warner Bailey, an English eccentric, at a car-trunk sale in France in 1994. Bailey told his friend, Miranda Seymour, that Delangle's story needed telling. Intrigued, Seymour followed the Delangle trail and, gifted at reporting and wonderfully imaginative, turned a long-forgotten publicity cache into history. Delangle drove like a dream. Bugatti Queen reads like one.

This review was published in the Chicago Sun-Times Dec. 19, 2004.