On 12 May 1957, Alfonso de Portago was driving a works Ferrari through the Italian countryside at racing speed when a tyre failed near the village of Guidizzolo, in the final stretch of the Mille Miglia. He was killed. So was his co-driver, Edmund Nelson. So were several spectators who had gathered at the roadside to watch the race pass. The Mille Miglia, one of the oldest and most romanticised events in motorsport, was never held as an open road race again.
The man behind the number
Alfonso de Portago was not an easy person to summarise. A Spanish nobleman by birth, he had competed seriously in bobsleigh, show jumping and steeplechase before turning his attention to motor racing – and had done so with enough ability to reach Formula 1 with Ferrari. He was 28 years old when he died.
In racing terms he was still developing, still establishing himself in a sport where his gifts were real but his experience was limited. He had taken a podium on his debut at the Tour de France Automobile and had shown consistent speed in sports car racing. Ferrari believed in him enough to give him serious machinery. The 1957 Mille Miglia was meant to be part of that progression.
The race and the road
The Mille Miglia, run annually since 1927 with interruptions, was a point-to-point race across Italian public roads – roughly a thousand miles from Brescia to Rome and back. It was fast, spectacular and deeply dangerous. Drivers raced through towns and villages at speeds that left almost no margin for anything going wrong.
The Ferrari 335 S of De Portago and Nelson at 1957 Mille Miglia
By 1957 the risks were well understood. The 1956 race had already produced serious accidents. Debate about whether such events should continue on open public roads was not new. The sport was also still absorbing the consequences of the 1955 Le Mans disaster, in which over eighty spectators had been killed. The broader question of how motorsport balanced spectacle against safety had not been resolved.
Guidizzolo
De Portago’s Ferrari shed a tyre at high speed near Guidizzolo with fewer than fifty kilometres remaining to Brescia. The car left the road and ploughed into the crowd. De Portago and Nelson were killed. A number of spectators died alongside them, among them children. The full toll of the accident made it one of the worst in Italian motorsport history.
The circumstances of the tyre failure were investigated at length. Enzo Ferrari was subsequently charged with manslaughter, a legal process that continued for years before eventually being dropped. The questions around what had failed, why, and whether it could have been prevented were never fully resolved to public satisfaction.
The end of the Mille Miglia
The Italian government moved quickly. The 1957 race was the last. The Mille Miglia as a competitive open-road event was finished. It was later revived as a regularity rally for historic vehicles, which continues today, but the racing version that de Portago entered that morning in May 1957 was gone.
The event left behind a complicated legacy, celebrated for its romance and its place in the history of the sport, impossible to separate from the deaths it had caused across its running. De Portago’s accident did not start the argument about road racing safety, but it ended one of the most famous road races ever held.
A brief career, a lasting consequence
Alfonso de Portago had not yet become the driver he might have been. His Formula 1 career was short, his sports car programme still building momentum. What he left behind was not a body of results but the accident that closed a chapter of motor racing. That is a bleak kind of remembrance for a driver who deserved a better ending to his story.
Edmund Nelson, his co-driver, deserves to be named alongside him. He is often reduced to a footnote in accounts of that day.
