DPTJ Script: How the death of a myth killed the Mille Miglia in 1957
On the shocking death of Ferrari racer Alfonso de Portago
On May 12, 1957, a group of locals from Guidizzolo, Italy gathered in front of their homes to watch some of the world's finest sports cars flash by en route to the finish line that would mark the end of the grueling Mille Miglia. For 30 years, other locals and previous generations stood alongside that very same ribbon of road, watching that very same race.
But on May 12, a Ferrari 335 S scythed through the crowd, and in an instant, nine spectators were dead — cut down just outside their homes. This was the crash that would kill the Mille Miglia, Italy's iconic 1,000-mile race from Brescia to Rome. Ask around, though, and you might find that the tragedy of civilian deaths was nothing compared to the horror of that Ferrari's driver, Spanish nobleman Alfonso de Portago.
If you watched the 2023 film Ferrari starring Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, then you're likely familiar with this incident; the crash shown at the end of the movie is the very one that ended the Mille Miglia. Today on “Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys,” though, we're going to turn our gaze to the driver in question, Alfonso de Portago, in order to better understand how some motorsport accidents are deemed more tragic than others thanks to the mythic status drivers like Portago held.
The history of European open-road racing
Long before there was a single permanent race circuit to be found in Europe, a motorsport event consisted of driving from one city to the next as quickly as possible over open, public roads.
The first such event took place in 1894, when some of the earliest automobiles attempted to travel from Paris to Rouen — a distance of 79 miles that would be a breeze today but that would have been a much more daunting prospect for the drivers of those early cars.
Back then, the concept of an automobile sprang to life when some enterprising tinkerers decided to fit a power source — sometimes a combustion engine, an electric motor, or a big belching steam engine — to the carriages they had laying around in the stables. The result were these bulky, square boxes teetering on large wooden wheels shod in a strip of rubber. Those early city-to-city drivers steered with a long, wobbly tiller that could be wrenched from their hands the moment they hit a bump — and yes, bumps were common. Brakes were a piece of wood that would be jammed down on the tire, and the driver would have to pull on a lever with all his might to, perhaps, bring his motor car to a stop.
But as primitive as those machines sound to us today, they were effectively technological marvels, and when a slew of early French machines took off from Paris in 1894, there was the spark of innovation in the air. Locals gathered along the dusty road from Paris to Rouen, and some of the more skeptical among them raced the puttering cars on horseback, building up a big gap, then turning around to meet the early automobiles before rocketing ahead once again, taunting.
With an average speed of 11.6 miles per hour, it took those early automobiles seven hours to reach Rouen — though, admittedly, most of the machines failed to get close. Those that made it had spent a long day being jarred to the bone by rutted roads, inhaling endless clouds of white dust, and, in some cases, even being attacked by farm dogs that were horrified by all the racket. But when that first car crossed the line in Rouen, the men behind the wheel were heroes, and a new sport had been born.
It's hard to imagine the kind of breathless reporting that went on in the newspapers after that “race,” but all of France was enamored by the idea that they could travel from one place to another without needing to saddle up a horse. More city-to-city races began to pop up, linking Paris to Dieppe, then Paris to Bordeaux, and then, in the first example of an international event, Paris to Berlin.
Automotive technology was still primitive, but those early races proved that there was plenty of room to experiment with design. Alternative forms of power faded as internal combustion engines became the preferred power plant, and those engines started to swell in size and power. The teetering, boxy bodies got lower, and the tiller was replaced with a wide steering wheel. By 1898, some of the newest cars were able to travel at almost 30 miles per hour.
And as speeds increased, so did the danger. First came the death of the Marquis of Montaignac, who lost control of his early automobile in 1898 and was thrown to his death. Then, more drivers began to die behind the wheel. Finally, in 1903, so many cars were entering races, and so many spectators had begun to crowd the racing surface, that death wasn't just inevitable — it was about to descend on motorsport like a plague.
It was the 1903 Paris-to-Madrid race. Of the 224 cars that started the event, half of them crashed. Eight people were killed: five drivers, three spectators. An estimated 100 more people were seriously injured. In the aftermath, newspapers speculated that open-road racing would be banned almost instantly.
Then, three years later, Sicily introduced the mighty Targa Florio. Germany debuted the Kaiserpreis. France had open-road circuits near Le Mans and Dieppe. In 1907, the Isle of Man TT appeared. Even though a handful of closed-course circuits began to appear around Europe, there was nothing quite as appealing as the lure of the open road, and that's exactly how we ended up with the iconic Mille Miglia.
The Mille Miglia — English for “one thousand miles” — entered the racing scene in 1927. A group of noblemen were dismayed that the annual Italian Grand Prix was about to be moved from their hometown of Brescia to a new circuit known as Monza, and they wanted a new way to get their speed fix closer to home.
At the helm of this new endeavor were two Counts — Aymo Maggi and Franco Mazzotti — one sports manager named Renzo Castagneto, and the renowned motorsport journalist Giovanni Canestrini. Add in a handful of big-money backers and a thousand-mile race course carved out from Brescia to Rome, and you had in your hands a recipe for success that attracted some of the biggest names in pre-war motorsport.
Those connections were critical in getting the Mille Miglia up and running. If you know anything about Italy, you probably know that the country boasts incredibly diverse traditions, cuisines, and attitudes, and that's because Italy existed as a loose confederation of various states until the mid- to late-1800s. Even though Brescia and Rome technically existed in the same country, both cities would have clung to their own distinct histories, and the Mille Miglia founders would have needed to secure approval from both cities — and every single district along the way. And who knew if they'd all agree?
As it turns out, a little political clout and the promise of a handsome payday can open a lot of doors that you might have expected to be impossible to open. Add into the mix an intense passion for sport and a national desire to regain one's foothold against the strong automotive manufacturers from other countries, and you've got a pretty compelling argument for why this 1000-mile race needs to happen. All those disparate districts agreed, and Italy itself provided 25,000 soldiers to marshal the lengthy course.
The first race was scheduled for March 26th, 1927, and at exactly 8am, an eight-liter Isotta Fraschini driven by co-founder Count Aymo Maggi burst from the start line in an explosion of sound, and the very first Mille Miglia had begun.
Seventy-seven cars competed in that first race, which lasted almost 40 hours, and was won by Ferdinando Minoia and Giuseppe Morandi behind the wheel of an Officine Meccanique 665 Sport.
During the pre-war era, cars got much quicker even if they failed to equal that speed with their reliability, and the race grew in popularity, but as World War II approached, it was clear the Mille Miglia's time was limited. In 1938, the last event before the war, a Lancia killed 10 spectators and forced the subsequent event to take place over eight laps on a 103-mile circuit. It was only after WWII that racing kicked off again in full force, when the event was revived by three of its four original founders. In 1947, Italy was still struggling to recover, but the government lifted fuel restrictions just so a field of predominantly Italian racers could revitalize the pride of a nation in distress.
Grids swelled into the hundreds, with modern, purpose-built race cars competing against pre-war racers as well as plenty of road cars, and the fact that it took place just before the 24 Hours of Le Mans made it even more attractive to foreign automakers who were looking to get into the racing game.
Still, as the 1950s continued, it was clear that a motorsport reckoning was going to be needed, and that the Mille Miglia would have to play a role in that. After the 1955 Le Mans tragedy, organizers capped the entry list at 400 cars, while the route had been altered to avoid some of the more dangerous sections. In the cities and towns the Mille Miglia carved through, more attention was paid to keeping spectators away from the racing surface, and as a result of those changes and a frankly miserable day on the weather front, speeds dropped considerably, with the 1956 running of the Mille Miglia taking 90 minutes longer to complete than the race the year before.
Despite the precautions, there was nothing organizers could do about the rain, and during the event, six people were killed — three drivers, and three spectators — with another 14 injured.
Contemporary reports at the time largely brushed over those deaths and injuries; the drivers weren't particularly notable, and, after all, the weather was poor enough that it would have been a miracle if there hadn't been a few crashes along the way. In fact, one of the most widely distributed stories from that race, at least as far as the specialist motorsport press was concerned, was journalist Denis Jenkinson's deeply reported and often very funny Motor Sport Magazine story about joining Stirling Moss for the big race… only for their car to crash in the foul weather.
The stage, then, was set for 1957: the year that would see the death of the Mille Miglia.
Meet Alfonso de Portago
His given name was Don Alfonso Antonio Vincente Eduardo Angel Blas Francisco de Borja Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, 11th Marquess of Portago, Grandee, but if you saw his name on a race entry list, it would read simply Alfonso de Portago, and if you got to know him, you would have called him Fon.
If that lengthy name didn't give it away, Alfonso de Portago was a member of Spanish nobility born to a father who was a great golfer and president of a prominent country club, and a mother who was a nurse in Ireland. He was named after his godfather, King Alfonso XIII, and from the moment he entered the world in a hospital in London, he was given the kind of upbringing that seemed to belong to a different era.
And that's perhaps because his family tree was littered with greatness. His grandfather had been mayor of Madrid, and he could trace his lineage all the way back to Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer and one of four survivors of the 1527 Narváez expedition. Intended to explore and colonize Florida, hurricanes, illness, starvation, and backlash from the local indigenous communities meant that the crew of 600 was whittled down to just four men who managed to escape enslavement and voyage to Mexico City. They were the first known Europeans to lay eyes on the Mississippi River, to cross the Gulf of Mexico, and to travel across Texas.
Portago's schooling was done in Biarritz, France, and he grew up speaking four languages: Italian, French, his native Spanish, and English, which he was said to have spoken with a distinctive British accent. While motorsport fans know Portago for his racing exploits, he was one of those all-around sportsmen from a bygone age, back when nobility was trained in a variety of sporting activities.
He learned how to fly planes, and at age 17 won a $500 bet by proving he could fly a craft below the London Tower bridge. His love of horse riding quickly became competitive, and thanks to his slight-but-bordering-on-just-a-little-too-big size, he twice participated in the Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree as a gentleman jockey. He was also a bobsleigh runner, and in 1956, he gathered together some cousins to compete in the 1956 Winter Olympic Games — making them the first Spanish bobsleigh team in the history of the Games. He and his family had a few practice runs before buying sleds in Switzerland, then jumped right into competition where they placed fourth, just 0.16 shy of a medal.
But it was Portago's other love — motorsport — that we're going to talk about today.
It's not completely clear how Portago fell in love with motorsport, but some sources say it was the result of a man named Edmond Nelson. As Portago traveled the world, he became a regular feature at the iconic Plaza Hotel in New York City. There, Nelson — a 42-year-old native of South Dakota, an Air Force veteran, and the elevator operator at the Plaza — got to know Portago quite well. Many suggest that it was Nelson who introduced the Spanish nobleman to the wild world of motorsport, and it wasn't long before Nelson and Portago became inseparable. However, other people allege that Nelson actually had very little functional knowledge of motorsport — that he was more interested in the thrill of danger.
In 1953, Alfonso de Portago got his first taste of motorsport at one of the most dangerous open-road races of all time, the Carrera Panamericana. This race, intended to celebrate the completion of the Mexican leg of a highway designed to link North and South America from tip to tail, saw drivers carving through dense jungles and high mountain passes on roads that hardly deserved that description. In the event's five-year history, at least 31 people died — some of them racers, some of them civilian spectators. But when Ferrari importer Luigi Chinetti asked Portago to be his co-driver, the Spaniard leaped at the chance. They were classified 98th of 182 entries and were one of over 100 cars that failed to finish the event.
But Portago was positively hooked. The following year, it didn't take much goading by Franco-American racer Harry Schell before Portago was convinced to buy a Ferrari that the two men could share in sports car races. Portago sourced his Ferrari in America, from Luigi Chinetti, and he started to find himself competing in bigger and bigger races. And in 1955, Portago was keen on joining one of the biggest marques in motorsport: Scuderia Ferrari.
That year, Ferrari had a frankly impressive cast of drivers lined up for his events: Eugenio Castellotti, Nino Farina, Olivier Gendebien, Mike Hawthorn, and Maurice Trintignant took on the Grand Prix side of things, while Piero Taruffi, Umberto Maglioli, and Phil Hill headed the endurance racing program. But Enzo Ferrari wasn't the kind of man to completely write off a decent driver, and he made a car available for Portago for non-championship Grands Prix and lesser sports car races.
And he had a decent year. He took second in the 1955 Venezuelan Grand Prix, entering a Ferrari 750 Monza under his own name, and won the Governors’ Trophy at Nassau during the Bahamas Speed Weeks. Those were impressive enough stats, but it was still very obvious that Portago was still a little rough. He was known as a “two-car man,” a nickname given to drivers who seemed absolutely incapable of preserving their machinery during an event and therefore needing a second car. It was a rare day that the Marquess didn't burn out his brakes, clutches, or transmissions, and he was also prone to wrecking cars that a more experienced driver could have saved.
Brock Yates also described Portago as “the original punk aristocrat” who was born “five centuries too late.” He was the kind of “quintessential adventurer, lover and general rakehell of a type Ferrari loved,” and that he was a “brutal, uncaring driver who got around the track on nerve alone.”
I’m going to quote pretty extensively from Yates here in his biography of Enzo Ferrari, because I think it really gives Portago the fully rounded character treatment:
[Portago] worked hard to dress down, favoring leather jackets, long hair, and a stubble of a beard and generally smelling of garlic and onions. Although he was married to a wealthy American woman, Portago carried on a number of flashy romances in Europe with the likes of international model Dorian Leigh and actress Linda Christian. Accomplished at polo, bobsledding, and chasing — both steeples and females — Portago was attracted to automobile racing for its pure, brazen danger. He managed to break a leg in a 1954 Silverstone crash while developing a bravado driving style that intrigued Ferrari. Fluent in four languages and sufficiently infused with his royal heritage to believe he had a shot at the Spanish throne should Francisco Franco step down or be deposed, he was a favorite of Ferrari's from the start. It was Portago's garabaldino style that fascinated Ferrari, as well as his outrageous, audacious approach to life.
Safe to say, Enzo Ferrari was sufficiently impressed with what he saw to promote Portago to the full Grand Prix team for 1956. It was a year of retirements, yet the absolute highlight of his career was second place at the British Grand Prix in a car he shared with Peter Collins. In the sports car realm, he also took a victory at the Tour de France in a Ferrari GT; taken together, it was enough for Portago to keep a slot at the Scuderia heading into the 1957 season.
He joined the retinue of drivers that the Italian press dubbed il squada primavera — the spring team. When Juan Manuel Fangio left Ferrari, a slate of young guns jockeyed for a slot on the Ferrari Grand Prix team. The Scuderia had signed a surplus of talent to its overall racing program, albeit with no guarantee about where Ferrari may place them. Maybe they'd have a shot at the Grand Prix team. Maybe Enzo kept assigning you to minor sports car races. Il Commendatore was playing a game of chess, and the drivers were his pawns; impress him, and you might move up the ranks.
If you've been a longtime listener of “Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys,” the men peopling Ferrari's spring team will be familiar names by this point: Luigi Musso, Eugenio Castellotti, Peter Collins, Mike Hawthorn, Wolfgang von Trips, Olivier Gendebien, Phil Hill, and of course, Portago. Each of these men fascinated Enzo Ferrari in their own way, and the team boss seemed to take pleasure in toying with their weaknesses to see how far he could push them. And yes, DPTJ listeners who recognize these guys will also remember that many of them died racing a Ferrari.
The Ferrari crew headed to Argentina for the opening Grand Prix of the 1957 Formula 1 season, where the best finish from the team came in the form of a shared drive between Jose Froilan Gonzalez and Portago. Together, they finished fifth.
Castellotti was the sports car ace of the group. In 1956, he'd won both the Mille Miglia and the 12 Hours of Sebring; heading into 1957, he was the driver expected to lead the Ferrari team. Each year, Ferrari prepared and entered a variety of cars and drivers for events like the Mille Miglia, but there were always one or two entries that really stood out as seeming almost unstoppable. Castellotti was that driver.
He was also the driver Ferrari called on in early March when he needed a record broken. Over at Autodromo di Modena, the track used by both Maserati and Ferrari as a test site, the lap record had just been broken by Jean Behra. Behra drove for Maserati. Ferrari refused to be beaten, even if Behra's record was unofficial. So he sent Castellotti over to break that record — quickly.
The real problem? Castellotti was head over heels in love with actress and girlfriend Delia Scala, and it seemed as if his affection for her could rival his desire to race. Enzo Ferrari didn't want that, and so when he called up Castellotti to break that Modena record, it just so happened to be while he was vacationing with Scala.
No matter how annoyed he was at the interruption, Castellotti couldn't exactly say ‘no’ and risk his position at the team. He rushed from Florence, intent on breaking the record as quickly as possible so he could get back to spending time with his girlfriend. When he arrived, he found a crew of mechanics and a new Tipo 801 Formula 1 car waiting for him. He wasted no time suiting up and blasting around the track the moment his 2.5-liter engine had warmed. On his second fast lap, he flew by the pits at over 100 mph. Moments later came the sickening squeal of tires and the crunch of steel and aluminum twisting into oblivion. Castellotti was hurled 100 yards after he bounced over the curb, his Ferrari left tumbling in his wake. By the time anyone arrived, Eugenio Castellotti was dead, just 26 years old.
According to Brock Yates, the other drivers in Ferrari's stable were appalled. Peter Collins had been extremely close to Enzo Ferrari — at least, until he got married. Then, Enzo shunned him, their relationship souring and becoming almost bitter. Hill had only just joined the team and arrived in time to hear Ferrari tell reporters that he suffers when one of his cars is destroyed. Realizing Hill was there, he quickly added, “The driver, too, of course.” But there was nothing much they could do — certainly not with the Mille Miglia so quickly arriving. Someone would need to replace Castellotti, after all.
Ferrari awarded that top seat to the 50-year-old Piero Taruffi, with the young guns remaining in their originally assigned roles. But when Luigi Musso got sick just before the race, there was no one left to call but Alfonso de Portago.
Portago openly disliked the event, telling reporter Ken Purdy, “A race I don't like very much is the Mille Miglia. No matter how much you practice, you can't possibly come to know 1,000 miles of Italian roads as well as the Italians, and as Fangio says, if you have a conscience you can't drive really fast anyway. There are hundreds of corners in the Mille Miglia where one little slip by a driver will kill 50 people. You can't keep the spectators from crowding into the road — you couldn't do it with an army. It's a race I hope I never run in.
Enzo Ferrari knew it was a risk signing the “madcap marquis” to his lineup, but Enzo Ferrari had very little choice. If anything, it was likely that Il Commendatore was hoping to use that insecurity of Portago's to his advantage.
As Michael Cannell describes in his book The Limit, Enzo Ferrari gathered his drivers — Portago, Wolfgang von Trips, Olivier Gendebien, Piero Taruffi, Peter Collins, and several more — at a hotel just south of the starting point in Brescia. There, Ferrari began to stick his claws into the drivers. When it came to Portago, Enzo Ferrari claimed that he was confident the Spaniard would be beaten by Gendebien, even though Gendebien was driving a less powerful machine — a Ferrari 250 GT compared to Portago's 355S.
Portago determined that he'd prove Ferrari wrong.
The 1957 Mille Miglia
Alfonso de Portago seemed to sense that all was not right heading into the 1957 Mille Miglia.
The night before the race, as 13 Ferrari drivers and their wives and girlfriends pushed together a few tables at a restaurant in Brescia, Portago was in a reflective mood.
“Life has to be lived to the full,” he mused to the group. “It is better to be wholly alive for thirty years than half-dead for sixty.”
He had written his lover Dorian Leigh, “As you know, in the first place I did not want to do the Mille Miglia. Then Ferrari said I must do it, at least in a gran turismo car. Then I was told I had to do it in a new 3800 cc sports car. That means that my ‘early death’ may well come next Sunday.”
When asked by reporters what his goals were, Portago said he had two: One, to finish. And the second? To make it back to Brescia “safe and sound.” It was a generous hope, considering he was running an immensely powerful car with no practice.
The following morning, at 5:31 a.m., Portago and his co-driver Edmund Nelson were waved off from the starting stand in Brescia to begin their thousand-mile journey into the history books. Yes, that's the same Edmund Nelson from before, the elevator operator that Portago met in New York. He would be guiding Portago through the mess of corners, trying to beat the 293 other cars that had been entered in the 1957 Mille Miglia.
The first miles of the race were dotted by the slower cars that had been launching off the start line since 11 o’clock the night before, presenting a huge challenge to a driver anxious about this event. But when Portago and Nelson arrived at their first checkpoint, they were told they ranked fourth overall, with nothing but fellow Ferraris in front of them.
If they'd already made it up to fourth, surely second place should be possible. And just like that, Portago's fears fell away. He was instead consumed by the overwhelming desire to win, and to win at all costs.
The race continued. At a checkpoint in Rome, actress Linda Christian burst through the crowd to snatch a passionate kiss from her lover behind the wheel — and despite the pressure to keep moving, Portago obliged.
Soon after, he seemed to lose his nerve. As the route wound through the Apennines, snow began to fall, and as they carved down to lower elevations, that snow turned to a steady drizzle. Portago slowed down, drove with care.
But at the final stop of the race, just south of Bologna, Ferrari's pre-race warning to Portago had come true: Olivier Gendebien had managed to pass him, and Portago was now placed in fifth.
Enzo Ferrari was there in Bologna, and despite the bad news, he had a morsel of information that might just push Portago into action: Up in second place, Peter Collins’ transaxle was breaking, and he wouldn't finish the race. In the lead, Taruffi's rear end was grinding.
Alas, Ferrari said. You're still behind Gendebien, just as I said.
When just minutes before, he had told Olivier Gendebien that he'd better pick up the pace, because Portago was catching up.
Portago saw Ferrari's words for what they were: A warning. As he prepared to head out of the pits, he resolved to overcome his fear of this race. He could beat Gendebien — and if he managed that, then it sounded like he had a damn good shot at inheriting that coveted second place. And with nothing but a long, straight stretch of road remaining through the Po River Valley, Portago was confident he'd be able to pass all those cars on sheer pace alone.
He was in the process of pulling from the pits when a mechanic flagged him to point out that the left front control arm was bent, pushing the tire ever so slightly into the bodywork of the car. They'd need to do a tire change, now.
But Portago waved them off. He couldn't waste any more time.
All seemed fine as he and Nelson took off, and their confident pace only quickened when they rocketed past the broken-down Ferrari of Peter Collins. One down. Two to go — and Gendebien must be just over the horizon.
Fewer than 30 miles remained, and Portago was on the road to Guidizzolo — a narrow but flat stretch carving its way toward a stone commune that saw speeds brush beyond 160 miles per hour. Not far behind would be the finish line, an end to what would have been nearly 14 straight hours of driving, and the conviction that he had beaten Enzo Ferrari's expectations.
A handful of locals had gathered on the side of the road, leaving behind the comfort of their homes to creep up to the pavement and watch the most dominant cars of the Mille Miglia run to the finish.
All those spectators saw of Alfonso de Portago's Ferrari was a hunk of red-painted metal rocketing directly at them. The car was just high enough to miss the first row of spectators, but it pinwheeled into the second row before coming to a brutal stop against a pole. The car disintegrated, showering shards of metal into the crowd as the hunk of twisted Ferrari finally came to rest in a drainage ditch.
Alfonso de Portago was dead. He had been scythed in half when the hood of his Ferrari recoiled back into his body. Beside him, Portago's friend and co-driver Edmund Nelson had also been killed. Ten limp bodies studded the grass. Five of those dead were children.
For all of his bad omens before the race, Portago had still been cavalier about his racing.
“I won't die in an accident,” he boasted. “I'll die of old age, or be executed in some gross miscarriage of justice.
Edmund Nelson disagreed. “Every time Portago comes in from a race the front of his car is wrinkled where he had been nudging people out of the way at 130 mph.” Nelson contended that his friend wouldn't live to be 30.
Now, the two friends were killed, side by side, racing to the finish line of the Mille Miglia.
Earlier that week, Alfonso Portago was asked to pen a feature in Sports Illustrated, where he was quoted as saying, “When I have actually lost control of the car there is absolutely nothing I can do except sit still, frozen with fear, and wait for events to take their natural course.” The United Press contended that, with that statement, Portago had written his own obituary.
In that same article, Portago asked, “Do we ever get frightened? We get terrified. Fear is the awareness of danger. Whenever a driver makes a mistake and loses control of his car even for a split second, the danger is acute, and he is frightened.”
“Sometimes, when a friend is killed, you swear that you will never race again,” he continued. “The next day, you think, ‘this could never happen to me.’”
But on May 12, 1957, it did happen to Alfonso de Portago.
I want to pull another quote from Robert Daley's book Cars at Speed, because I think it really beautifully captures this tragedy.
His life was intense, and at twenty-eight, complete. There are those who wrote afterwards that he was in love with death, but they did not know him and this statement is absurd. Alfonso de Portago was in love with life. “Perhaps we appreciate life more,” he wrote of racing drivers, “because we live closer to death.”
He seemed to me the most alive man I had ever known. He was sensitive, restless, curiously gentle, and it is impossible to describe that impression of straining vitality which he communicated, nor to do justice to the overwhelming disbelief his friends felt when news of his death arrived.
It seemed like he had everything a man could need with which to challenge life: charm, looks, wealth, and courage. If he failed, his friends thought, what chance has anyone? The answer was obvious: none. Portago was not merely killed. In the wreck the hood of his car lashed back and cut him in two.
As his body was laid to rest in the family tomb in Madrid, he was mourned in many parts of the rest of the world. Jean Behra, the French driver, said, “Only those who do not move, do not die; but are they not already dead?”
Impact of the 1957 Mille Miglia
The fallout from the 1957 Mille Miglia accident was swift. Scuderia Ferrari had swept the top three finishing positions at the end of the thousand-mile adventure, with Piero Taruffi leading the charge for the final victory of his career. Rather than celebrate, though, Enzo Ferrari was slapped with 11 counts of manslaughter charges.
In Italy, laws stated that for every death, there must be someone responsible — and in the case of motorsport, this meant that if someone died during a race, then Italian law dictated that someone must be held liable. With Alfonso de Portago dead, Enzo Ferrari was dragged into court to defend himself and his racing operation. Similar charges were raised against Colin Chapman of Lotus when Jochen Rindt died at the 1970 Italian Grand Prix, and against the leaders of the Williams F1 team when Ayrton Senna died at Imola in 1994.
Enzo Ferrari spent three years battling the charges in court, even as Osservatore Romana, the official newspaper of the Vatican, compared him to Saturn, the Titan of myth who ate his own children in order to win. The case languished in court until, finally, Ferrari was able to convince the judge to assemble a panel of automotive engineers in order to actually find out what happened. They determined that the accident had to do with a “cat's eye” reflector on the road; Portago must have struck it at the wrong angle and lost control. Enzo Ferrari was acquitted.
As Ferrari prepared for the rest of 1957 and beyond, the team found itself forced to undergo a hierarchy change. Eugenio Castellotti and Alfonso Portago had been the rising stars of the team, and with the racing season continuing on in full force, Enzo Ferrari had no time for futile things like mourning. Instead, drivers Wolfgang von Trips and Phil Hill were both lifted up the ranks. Both had been subject to ample criticism from Il Commendatore, and both had suffered the indignity of demotions, firings, or sidelinings when a better option came along. Now, with the team's ranks exhausted, they earned the promotion they'd both desperately craved, and that they now accepted with apprehension.
As for the Mille Miglia itself, well — there was simply no way the race could continue, at least not as a high-speed race.
After the wreck, Italian paper, the Corriere d’Informazione carried a headline that translated to “The Mille Miglia, Cemetery of Babies and Men, ENOUGH!” L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, likened Enzo Ferrari to the titan Saturn, devouring his “children” in the vainglorious pursuit of cups and titles. With the Le Mans tragedy not even two years in the past, newspapers around the world began to publish their opinion that the race should be canceled. That Tuesday night, the Italian Automobile Club and the Italian Motorcycle Federation drafted joint statements to call off the Mille Miglia in the future.
A quick response, yes — but the impact of the accident lingered. Again, I want to pull from Robert Daley's Cars at Speed, because he raises a really fascinating point about why the Mille Miglia was ultimately canceled — and it seemingly had less to do with the death of all those spectators than with the death of Alfonso de Portago himself.
Even the death of such a man as Portago in 1957, while perhaps capable of extinguishing the Mille Miglia, is probably not enough to crush road racing permanently.
For the conviction is inescapable that the Mille Miglia was stopped not because Portago's car killed 11 persons, but because it killed a figure as glamorous as Portago. He had been romantic in an age which had no time for romance. He had been a sort of modern conquistador, and much of the world watched breathlessly the fantastic things he tried and got away with.
Other races killed more people (Le Mans, Argentina, Monza), but were raced again the next year. For no driver as renowned as Portago was killed, and the headlines had died out in a day or two. It was, to my mind, the Portago publicity which stopped the Mille Miglia — the grisly funerals at Guidizzolo, and then again at Madrid; the impassioned declarations of the movie actress he had been living with; the photos of his wife, his children, and the former mistress who had borne him an illegitimate son; his fantastic wealth; the pronouncement of the grief-stricken Fangio, Portago's friend, that the Mille Miglia, first run in 1927, must not be run again.
To Daley's mind, the overwhelming public sentiment that a little bit of the romantic enchantment left in the world had been snuffed out alongside Alfonso de Portago is the primary reason the Mille Miglia ended — and in a lot of ways, it's hard to argue with him. We've spoken about the 1955 Le Mans disaster on “Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys” before — hands-down the most horrifying racing incident of all time that killed over 80 spectators — and how the impact of that crash did result in a worldwide rethink of motorsport. As a result, a lot of Grands Prix were cancelled in 1955. Switzerland banned motorsport entirely, and in America, the AAA stepped back from sanctioning motorsport and opened the door for a new organization called USAC to take over.
But we still race at Le Mans — and for all the events that were canceled in response to the 1955 tragedy, there were plenty of others that went ahead as planned, without a second thought.
Given that Daley published this book in 1961, I do think public sentiment started to shift, particularly as these incidents became more public. It's hard to fathom the destruction ravaged by a crash like Pierre Levegh's at Le Mans if all you consume of it are a few poorly-lit photographs and some news articles. It was easier to mourn a singular man who seemed so glamorous and impervious to death.
That sentiment remained for a while, at least until motorsport became more easily consumable. Seeing a crash happen live on your television is a drastically different experience than passively reading about it after the fact, and a lot of fans started to realize that, actually, all this death was unacceptable. But I still do think that we've retained a greater bias toward losing those great drivers — something that's painfully obvious when we talk about the horror of losing Ayrton Senna at the 1995 San Marino Grand Prix and forget to mention that the day before, Roland Ratzenberger had been killed as well. One man was a wildly popular World Champion. The other had started exactly one Grand Prix previously. Ratzenberger's death left a bad taste in the mouths of race fans, but it was Senna's death that was deemed harrowing enough to make sweeping changes to safety.
Of course, I think there's also something to be said for the fact that the Mille Miglia was a race run on public roads, while Daley's other examples focus on incidents at closed courses. There's a certain level of risk associated with attending a motor race, so while you may not be expecting to be killed spectating Le Mans, there is at least a sense that you've agreed to accept that risk.
What made the 1957 Mille Miglia crash so uniquely horrifying was the fact that it killed several families who just happened to live along the race course. Those families may have gone out to watch the cars rush by, but it wasn't like they had any say in where the race was run. They didn't choose to attend the event. It was happening in front of their homes whether they liked it or not. And they were killed, simply because of where they lived. I'm sure the extinguishing of Portago's bright life kept the story in the papers, but I’d also hope that readers were also able to understand that the folks who were killed weren't even necessarily motorsport fans, and that they were killed just steps away from the safety of their home.
At the same time, I think Daley was onto something. The Mille Miglia was canceled almost instantly, but other open-road races were allowed to continue as if a very similar accident couldn't happen elsewhere. In Sicily, the Targa Florio carved through the mountains until 1977. Plus, there were countless closed-course tracks that still ran dangerously close to civilization, meaning that it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine a Formula 1 car rocketing into your pantry out in the Belgian countryside, or a sports car coming to rest among your flock of sheep.
Digging through Portago's obituaries, it's clear that he received the kind of treatment you didn't get from the press when a lesser-known driver died. The AP referred to him as “perhaps the most glamorous and exciting sports figures of our time” and dedicated ample page space to romanticizing his life, which was referred to as “one big tryst with Russian roulette — on steeplechase courses, icy bobsled runs, and neck-risking sports car courses of the world.” Other articles painted a beautiful picture of the family he'd abandoned, and of the liaisons he had with women like Dorian Leigh and Linda Christian.
In almost all of these stories, his co-driver Edmund Nelson generally receives no page space — or, if he did earn some, it was nothing but a paragraph. Countless men like Edmund Nelson had been killed in the racing world, and many had taken other lives on their way out. Their story, though, was far less appealing than that of the handsome nobleman risking his life for a taste of glory. And as for the dead spectators, well — they remain nameless and faceless, referred to only by their number. The tragedy of the whole situation firmly centered around Alfonso de Portago.
Because of all that, I do think the 1957 Mille Miglia raises an uncomfortable question that we've been faced with time and again in motorsport, and that I don't think we've ever adequately addressed: When does a crash matter? Why do we respond to some driver deaths with a hard heart and a shrug, when others demand periods of national mourning and sweeping regulatory changes to ensure no such tragedy ever happens again? And what does that say about us as race fans? As a society? As human beings?
If you have an answer, let me know.
Bibliography
Cars at Speed by Robert Daley
The Limit by Michael Cannell
Enzo Ferrari by Brock Yates
"Horror in Italy,” Sports Illustrated
The Horrific 1957 Ferrari Crash that Ended the Mille Miglia Race, History
Another Mille Miglia with Moss, Motor Sport Magazine
Smashup in Italy Snuffed Life of What May Have Been Most Exciting Figure of Today, AP
Portago, Car and Driver
Portago was associated with money; Nelson was not. Senna was associated with money, Ratzenburger was not.