Solving the problem with the free icon space at the beginning of each row doesn't seem to be as easy as it sounds.
It almost looks like an SWT bug or at least some weird behaviour of Windows. As soon as you assign an image to any cell, not only will the first column additionally reserve space for the same size of image, all images in other columns will be rescaled to that size as well.
So the free space at the beginning of each row you currently see actually has the same width as the car image.
Assuming there's no workaround for this, I'm not quite sure how to deal with it. Right now, it not only creates the weird effect of the free space in the first column, it also leads to the connector icons being streched (because the car images are wider).