Baroness Ewy von Korff-Rosqvist, who has died aged 94, was, as Ewy Rosqvist, a pioneering rally driver in the postwar era. Known as “the Baroness of Mercedes-Benz”, she rose to fame in the mid-1950s and was Ladies European Champion for three consecutive years between 1959 and 1961, beating Stirling Moss’s sister Pat to the first of those titles.
While she was a heroine for women drivers, she happily described herself as a “leggy Swedish blonde” and was not adverse to using her femininity for commercial and media purposes.
Ewy Rosqvist’s name resounded around the world in November 1962 when, with her co-driver/navigator Ursula Wirth, she won the sixth Argentine Touring Car Grand Prix ahead of more than 250 men. They were the first all-female crew to win an international race and the first to win every stage of a world class rally event.
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“They said I could never finish, so I finished first,” Ewy Rosqvist said, after the international media had sneered at the two women. At the start of the race, the crowd had assumed that they were models working for Mercedes.
The gruelling drive on rural roads was a formidable test for any driver, yet Rosqvist and her partner stormed to a famous victory that humbled their talented male counterparts: their large Mercedes 220SE saloon, weighing more than two tons, finished three hours clear of the field, and besides winning every stage they set an event record for the fastest average speed.
Mercedes had hired the five-time Formula One world champion Juan Manuel Fangio as an adviser, and he had told Rosqvist never to steer around hazards, as the car would skid and crash. Despite such advice, Ewy Rosqvist’s Mercedes teammate Hermann Kühne was killed after overturning while trying to avoid a herd of goats in the road.
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A farmer’s daughter, Ewy had been a confident horse rider from childhood, while her skills behind the wheel had been honed on the rough roads of postwar Sweden, where she had learnt to drive, before becoming a veterinary assistant at the start of the 1950s. Her driving instructor, horrified at her speed, had jokingly asked her if she thought she was a rally driver.
Speeding from farm to farm to attend animals, and to deliver time-sensitive frozen bull sem*n for artificial insemination, she became the fastest junior vet around, driving long distances to appointments in a Mercedes-Benz 170S saloon provided by her father, and she began timing herself between farms.
In her 1963 autobiography Driving through Hell she wrote: “After two years, I was driving so well that I often finished for the day one and a half to two hours before my female colleagues despite all my stops at the farms.”
Her skill in controlling a car on slippery winter ice and gravel roads, and with time of the essence, led to her confidence at high speeds. As the celebrated Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson put it, “money cannot buy such experience, and Ewy made the most of it – she was so very fast, yet rarely had an incident. She never had a big crash”.
She was born Ewy Jonsson on August 3 1929 at Stora Herrestad, near Ystad in southern Sweden, where her parents ran the family farm. Of five children, she was the only girl.
In 1954 she married Ynvge Rosqvist, a keen motorcyclist and car racer, who introduced her to rallying. The couple entered local rallies with Ewy driving many of the stages. She teamed up with her sister-in-law, Anita Rosqvist-Borg, and the pair won several local rallies in the most nimble car of its era – the front wheel-drive Saab 93, in which they won the Norway Rally.
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A rally drive in a small Fiat 1100 did not produce the speed she required so Ewy Rosqvist bought her own rear-driven Volvo PV544 and began rallying as a part-time passion. She entered the 1957 Rally of the Midnight Sun with co-driver/navigator Maybrit Clausson but the car broke down.
She went back the following year to take the female class victory, and went on to win the Women’s Cup four times at the Midnight Sun Rally. She won the 1000 Lakes Rally in Finland – and just three years after her first rally became the 1959 Ladies European Champion.
Pat Moss, a show jumper as well as rally driver, lost the 1959 title to Ewy, but they shared the 1960 championship before the Swede won it outright the following year. Pat Moss, who won it again in 1962, 1964 and 1965, would go on to marry Erik Carlsson, to whom she had been introduced by Ewy’s friend, the English driver John Sprinzel.
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At this point Ewy Rosqvist was still working part-time as a veterinary assistant, but she became a full-time rally driver by joining the official Volvo rally team for the 1960 season; she won nine major rallies as well as her third European title in 1961. She was named Sportswoman of the Year that year by the Stockholms-Tidningen newspaper, and by the end of the following year she had been poached by Mercedes-Benz for their emerging rally team, buying out her Volvo contract.
She was sufficiently well-placed in the 1963 Monte Carlo Rally to become the first Swedish woman to win the Coupe de Dames trophy there. She was fifth in the Acropolis Rally and won her class in the six-hour race at the Nürburgring circuit in the Rhineland, demonstrating that she could race on tarmac as well as rally on dirt. She then took second place at the 1963 Argentine Touring Car Grand Prix that she had won the previous year.
Ewy Rosqvist’s first marriage was dissolved, and in June 1964 she married the Latvian-born German Baron Alexander von Korff, the motor sport director for Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart. He was descended from a line of medieval Prussian and Russian nobility from St Petersburg and the Duchy of Courland (now the Dobele region in central Latvia). The stylish couple were married in Stuttgart’s Old Castle chapel.
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Mercedes closed their rally team in 1965, and after freelancing for a couple of years Ewy von Korff-Rosqvist retired from competitive driving to care for her husband, who had become seriously ill.
After his death in Germany in 1977 she went home to Sweden, but retained a relationship with Mercedes-Benz as a roving corporate ambassador and as a guide at the company’s Stuttgart museum. She reckoned she could walk into any Swedish Mercedes dealership and walk out with a sports car, and her partner later in life was Karl Gustav Svedburg, the official importer of Mercedes-Benz cars into Sweden.
A Matchbox-Mattel scale model of the car Ewy Rosqvist had driven to victory in Argentina in 1962 was released in 2020.
Karl Gustav Svedburg died in 2009.
Ewy von Korff-Rosqvist, born August 3 1929, died July 4 2024