B. Bira

When you’re weighed down with  a name like Prince Birabongse Bhanutej Bhanubandh, you’ve got to do something about it if you want to go motor racing, so this Siamese tongue twister became B. Bira. That was the pseudonym under which a small, doll-like grandson of King Mongkut, played by Yul Brynner in the Fifties hit film The King and I, made his name in motor sport.

Bira was sent to Britain from Siam in 1927, when he was 13 years old, to be educated at Eton and Cambridge University, but at 21 he talked his wealthy cousin Prince Chula, who was also living in England, into financing his motor racing. They formed the White Mouse Stable and established their base in Hammersmith, London, bought two ERA B Types, and lured the car constructor’s chief mechanic away from the factory to work for them. Bira, who had never raced before, became one of the marque’s most successful drivers. He won the Coup Prince Rainier for voiturettes at Monte Carlo in April 1936, an event considered the world’s most important small-car race. He and Chula also bought Whitney Straight’s 2.9-liter Maserati 8CM in which the remarkable little Siamese prince came 6th in the Donington Grand Prix, famously won by Dick Seaman and Hans Ruesch in their Alfa Romeo 8C-35. And Bira won at Albi in one of the ERAs, by which time the British press was calling him the Caracciola of voiturette motor racing. Such was his talent that the works BMW team invited him to drive one of their cars in the 1936 Tourist Trophy, but he had starter motor trouble and the entire field charged off without him. He eventually got the car going and came 7th—breaking Tazio Nuvolari’s 2-liter class lap record three times as he did so! By the end of the year, this naturally talented novice had won the coveted British Racing Drivers’ Club Gold Star.