In the early 1960s, at a time when the Swedish actors Anita Ekberg and Mai Zetterling and the singer Monica Zetterlund were winning international attention, their compatriot Ewy Rosqvist brought a similar blond glamour to motor sport. Rosqvist, who has died aged 94, was the winner of the European women’s rally championship in 1959 and 1961.
In 1962, she and her co-driver Ursula Wirth confounded sceptics when they finished first of 257 entrants in the Gran Premio Argentina for touring cars, a challenging six-day event in which they covered 2,891 miles of rough, unprotected roads in their Mercedes saloon at an average speed of just under 80mph, finishing with an overall time three hours faster than their nearest challenger.
Only 43 of the starters made it to the end. The Argentinian spectators were astonished that women could be capable of triumphing in what was then, in Latin America, an almost exclusively male – not to say macho – sport. Among the non-finishers were the three other factory-entered Mercedes, all driven by men, including Hermann Kühne, who was killed when he left the road trying to avoid a herd of animals (some reports say goats, others wild horses).
Rosqvist said afterwards that she had benefited from the wisdom and local knowledge of Juan Manuel Fangio, a five-times Formula One world champion and an ambassador for Mercedes in Argentina, who advised her that, when confronted by a herd of animals, she should not attempt to take evasive action.
Both Rosqvist and Wirth had acquired the basis of their skills while working as veterinary assistants, a job that entailed driving from farm to farm across considerable distances in cars carrying supplies of time-critical bull semen. Having graduated to the world of international rallying, neither was reluctant to pose for press photographers who knew that such images would receive widespread exposure in the pages of newspapers and magazines.
The only girl of five children, Rosqvist was born Ewy Jönsson into a farming family in Stora Herrestad near Ystad in southern Sweden, attending agricultural school before studying veterinary medicine. She had learned to drive on the farm, and when she took a job as a vet’s assistant her father bought her a Mercedes 170. She kept a record of her times between farms, pleased to note that she covered her day’s itinerary faster than her colleagues.
Marriage in 1954 to Yngve Rosqvist, an amateur rally driver, brought her into contact with motor sport. The couple took part in events together, Ewy entering in her own right for the first time in Sweden’s Midnight Sun Rally in 1956. She was soon the main attraction, winning the European women’s title for the first time in 1959. The following year she gave up her veterinary work to join the works Volvo team, with whom she again won the European title in 1961.
Rosqvist’s greatest female rival during her years at the top of international rallying was Pat Moss, who won the women’s title in 1958, 1960, 1962, 1964 and 1965. It was through a friend of Rosqvist that Moss – the younger sister of Stirling Moss, the British hero of grand prix racing – met her husband, Erik Carlsson, the Swedish world rally champion.
In 1962 Rosqvist was bought out of her Volvo contract by Mercedes-Benz, who also signed Wirth as her co-driver. That year they won the women’s cup in the Rally of the Midnight Sun and the Rally of 1,000 Lakes in Finland, before crossing the Atlantic for the triumph in Argentina, in which Rosqvist set the fastest time for each stage. The following year they returned to take third place in the Gran Premio, behind two other Mercedes. She and Wirth also won that year’s Coupe des Dames in the Monte Carlo Rally.
In 1964 she and a new co-driver, Eva-Maria Falk, a German journalist, won their class and took fifth place overall in the Monte Carlo Rally, fifth in the Acropolis Rally and third place in the Spa-Sofia-Liège event. A repeat of the previous year’s third place in Argentina marked the end of a competitive career featuring only one notable accident, when Rosqvist and Wirth hit a road barrier but ducked in time to avoid injury as the windscreen was smashed.
After a divorce from Yngve, Rosqvist married Baron Alexander von Korff, Mercedes’s director of motor sport, in a ceremony in a Stuttgart castle in 1964. He died in 1977 after a long illness. Some years later she returned from Stuttgart to live in Stockholm with a new partner, Karl-Gustav Svedberg, a Mercedes dealer, until his death in 2009.
As with several of Mercedes’ most successful racing and rally drivers, Rosqvist retained strong links with the company for the rest of her life. While conducting tours of their museum in Stuttgart, she could show visitors the 220SE saloon with which she and Wirth had found glory in Argentina, displayed alongside the cars driven to victory in sports and grand prix races by Fangio and Moss.
Looking back on that day in 1962, and the dismissal of her chances in such a rugged event, she reflected: “They said I could never finish. So I finished first.”
• Ewy Rosqvist (Baroness Ewy von Korff-Rosqvist), rally driver, born 3 August 1929; died 4 July 2024
