From the archives of Bob Montgomery, motoring historian
COUNT ELIOT ZBOROWSKI:
Ireland is well served with events commemorating the great Irish Gordon Bennett Race of 1903 but for all the attention they serve to focus on the events and personalities involved, one colourful figure is rarely recalled.
I refer to the debonair Count Eliot Zborowski who was largely responsible for laying out the course of the Irish race but who sadly died in a motor racing accident before seeing the results of his labours.
A Pole by birth, he was married to the daughter of an American millionaire, yet he always regarded himself as an Englishman. Always immaculately turned out, he was a handsome man with a patrician manner, who seems to have been well-liked and respected by all who knew him. As well as driving a Mercedes inordinately fast, the Count was also a well-known steeple-chase rider - he won events at Punchestown and Fairyhouse. He had a warm regard for Ireland and the Irish, having lived here on occasion and having hunted in Meath and Kildare as well as riding regularly with the Carlow Hounds.
He wholeheartedly endorsed the idea of the 1903 race being held on a course in Ireland and himself surveyed several potential circuits during several visits to Ireland in the autumn of 1902. Motor News told the following story, which was to prove ironic, about his visit to Ireland in December 1902: "When Count Zborowski was in Ireland, his unfailing courtesy impressed the country people greatly. One old dame made a most happy remark. As he was moving on in his car she said fervently, 'May you have a real good motor in heaven, yer honour'."
When he died, Count Eliot Zborowski was driving a new 60 hp Mercedes at the Nice Speed Week. Two new Mercedes works drivers, Hermann Braun and Otto Hieronymus, made their debut in the event, led by the experienced Wilhelm Werner.
Both were outstanding, with Braun setting a new record for the standing mile and Hieronymus for the 151/2 kilometre Le Turbie hill climb. Zborowski had been flying in his new Mercedes and felt the record within his grasp. He crashed at the first sharp bend on the course, his car not appearing to slow at all for the corner. His car struck rocks and overturned, killing him instantly.
Charles Jarrott, writing in his classic Ten Years of Motors and Motor Racing said of Zborowski: "The man who could least have been spared to the sport was he who in every event in which he competed excited the admiration of competitors and spectators alike by reason of his keenness and at the same time sportsmanlike conduct".
Many years later, SCH 'Sammy' Davis - himself a distinguished racing driver and sporting editor of The Autocar - put forward the theory that one of Zborowski's cuff-links jammed the throttle open, causing the fatal crash. If so, the cuff-links were indeed unlucky, for his son, Louis, himself a successful racing driver, was wearing them when he was killed at the Monza circuit.
Count Eliot Zborowski, who did so much to bring the Gordon Bennett Race to Ireland, was buried in the churchyard at Burton Lazars, on the outskirts of Melton Mowbray, where his motor-racing son would join him some 21 years later.