Portago- the Mille Miglia & the Lady

[strad]

When I first came on here I told you I had a penchant for sharing my library..Well I find this to be one of the most poignant storys in Motorsport...Why did he linger for the kiss? I give you
THE END OF THE OPEN ROAD
by Robert Daley

At Guidizzollo in the Po Valley the country is flat and the narrow road pierces the grey-stone village like a spear. All day the villagers have stood outside their houses, gaping tensely at the speeding cars, shaken by the roar of the Mille Miglia.
The Mille Miglia: a thousand-mile race over the ordinary roads of Italy. Beginning before dawn at Brescia in the north, the cars have plunged south along the Adriatic coast, crossed to Rome, and sped up the spine of the Apennines towards Brescia again.
It is late afternoon now, and only a few cars remain to come by.
Guidizzollo is thirty miles from the finish. A boy is the first to spy the dot in the distance which swiftly looms
larger and larger.
‘Ferrari!’ he cries.
The people of the village strain forward from both sides of the road.
Now the Ferrari screams down upon them. Its speed must be at least 150 miles an hour.
Suddenly, incomprehensibly, the Ferrari swerves. Its tail wallops the left bank of the road, uprooting a milestone. It guillotines a telegraph pole, leaps into the air, and snaps the wires overhead. A murderous projectile out of control, it careens into the crowd on the right, bounds across the road, and mows down others on the left.
Only an instant has passed, but eleven are dead or dying and the
air is rent by screams of the horrified and the hurt. The shattered car
is caught like a line drive by a drainage ditch and lies half buried beside the road. Nearby, men come upon the bodies of the twenty-eight-year-old Spanish nobleman, Alfonso de Portago, who had driven the car, and his friend Gurner Nelson, who had gone along for the ride.
It remained only to be remarked bitterly in the Press that probably the Mille Miglia had killed for the last time, that world indignation would not permit the race to be run again.
The day of the open-road race was over.
* * * * *

Looking back, it is obvious that Don Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, seventeenth Marques de Portago, was a fool, that he was rushing towards violent death with a grin on his face and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. But at the time one tended to admire his fierce belief in a man’s right to play the game his own way, to envy the excitement he experienced, to suppose that he — and he alone — could go on that way for ever. Those older or wiser knew he couldn’t, but some of them respected him for trying, and some loved his insouciance, his courage, and his flair.
‘If I die tomorrow,’ Portago remarked near the end, ‘none the less, I have had twenty-eight wonderful years.’
Until the moment came when he was forced to throw in his hand it was possible to believe that a man could live that way, without thought of consequences. Or, rather, one wanted to believe it, and so one rooted for Portago against all the laws the gods had made.
He was a lithe, 170 lb. six-footer, and there was animal magnetism in the way he carried himself together with a kind of arrogance to which women responded. The women — Portago’s women — were all considered beauties, and were all five or more years older than he.
His fellow drivers considered him tenacious, daring. They were a little afraid of him, for he wanted to be world champion more than any of them, had less fear than they had, and did what he felt like doing at all times. He had burst upon their scene — in less than three full seasons he was the best-known personality in motor-racing, though far from the best driver.
To bobsledders he was a phenomenon, so adroit at guiding half-ton sleds down glazed ice chutes that he nearly stole a 1956 Olympic championship from men who had laughed at his inept driving only a week before. There too he had burst upon the scene — by losing control in a high-speed turn and being catapulted out of the sled at sixty miles an hour. He then admitted that he had had only two or three practice runs in Switzerland before buying a pair of thousand-dollar sleds ,and recruiting some cousins from Madrid, and entering his team in the Olympics for Spain. A week later he was good enough to finish fourth— and was bitterly disappointed to miss, by seventeen-hundredths of a second, the only Olympic medal at which Spain had a chance.
To journalists, Portago was a vein of gold.
At seventeen he had piloted a borrowed plane under a bridge to win a $500 bet. Later he had been the foremost amateur steeplechase jockey in the world. More recently he had walked blithely away from some of the most spectacular auto wrecks on record.
As if he weren’t colourful enough on his own, journalists noted that as such flamboyance had been commonplace in his family. His ancestors had helped chase the Moors from Spain, then sailed to explore the to New World. One of them, Nunez Cabeza de Vava, being shipwrecked
off Florida in 1528, marched his small band across the wilds of the American South to the safety of Spanish settlements in Mexico — an he epic trek which took eight years. Portago’s own father had been a Civil War hero, swimming out to a Loyalist submarine and blowing it up
with a home-made bomb.
Portago himself was courteous and articulate (in four languages) to journalists. He was also curiously gentle, and modest. Tales of his hair raising exploits came from others, not himself and when confronted by them he appeared embarrassed and was reluctant to elaborate.
Weekend after weekend he risked his life. It was a compulsion which he tried to explain by asserting that during moments of peril, every nerve in his body seemed alive, alert to all the sounds, sights, and smells around him.
But speed was more than a search for excitement. ‘A man has to find
something he can do well,’ he insisted. ‘Not only well in itself, but well in relation to the way other men are doing it. I can drive that well.’ He predicted he would win the driver’s world championship by the time he was thirty. Then, before he was thirty-five, he would quit racing.
After that?
‘I don’t know,’ he said restlessly. ‘There are many things.’ Politics interested him. He told some intimates that with his name, background, and the world championship he could almost name his post in the Spanish government.
‘The trouble with life,’ he remarked, ‘is that it’s too short. But I’m certainly not going to spend the rest of my life driving race-cars.’
He had black curly hair worn so long it hid his ears. He often appeared unshaven, grimy from working in the pits all day. He did not care about luxury. He had black eyebrows, deep-set smouldering dark eyes. He chain-smoked. Often he dressed in black. To some he seemed as mysterious as a pirate — one who spoke English with a cultured, slightly British accent.
He was not always serious. Once I asked how he had met his
blonde American wife.
‘One does not meet an American girl,’ he replied with a smile. ‘She meets you.~
What did she think of his racing?
The smile broadened. ‘I do not ask her. I am Spanish.’
The humour in the role of Spanish nobleman was apparent to him. Yet he enjoyed playing it sometimes.
He was off the road frequently that last year of his life. Harry Schell, a fellow driver and his closest friend, told him he would kill himself if he kept on taking such chances. Nelson, the friend who was killed with him, predicted that Portago would not live to be thirty:
‘Every time he comes in from a race the front of his car is wrinkled where he has been nudging other cars out of his way at 130 miles an hour.’
But he was getting closer to the world championship and he
ignored them. He passed a tiring winter, racing in Argentina, Nassau, Cuba, Florida. Then he went back to Europe.
Dozens of articles appeared about him. He wrote one himself
calling racing a vice, like any other vice. A man couldn’t give it up.
The papers duly reported his ‘friendship’ with Linda Christian, an actress. She said he would obtain a divorce and marry her. No one who knew him believed this. There had been other girl friends.
April passed, and the early days of May.
Portago did not want to drive in the Mille Miglia. He did not like long races to begin with and now he was bothered by presentiments of doom he could not shake off. He made a half-hearted effort to get out of the race, but the Ferrari factory claimed to be shorthanded.
So Portago shrugged, and wrote some letters tidying up his life. In one of them he remarked: ‘My “early death” may well come next Sunday.’
Friday passed, Saturday. Portago’s premonitions must have grown stronger, for he confided them to a few friends. He booked tickets to Monte Carlo, where he was scheduled to race the following weekend, as if, with the tickets in his hand, he could feel assured of that much future at least.
At midnight 12 May the Mille Miglia started, the smaller cars shooting down the ramp at one-minute intervals. It was dawn when Portago and Nelson, who had come down to ride with him for luck, arrived at the starting-line. In the excitement Portago appeared to cheer up. There were 301 cars entered. They were strung out on the road all the way to Rome. Why should anything happen to him among so many? He was to drive a 3.8 litre Ferrari with the number 531 painted on its sides. As his turn neared, he climbed into it, new, low, and a dull red in the dawn light. He started the engine, letting it idle powerfully, and Nelson settled into the seat beside him. The car ahead roared away and
Portago wheeled his Ferrari on to the ramp. At the signal he surged on to the road, upshifting swiftly, feeling the power of the big engine.

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Now, no doubt, as he responded to the demands of the race, he felt all of the old excitement and began once more to believe himself was immortal. He concentrated on braking, shifting, accelerating. Death: could not find him. He was moving too fast for it.
Portago had never before completed the Mille Miglia and he was hardly more familiar with its thousand miles of turns and straights,cities and mountains than any citizen who had studied a road map. To win he would have to shave the margin for safety more closely than the others would. He rocketed through Verona, Vincenza. At mid-morning
the Adriatic rose blue and shining into view. He was going well. With luck he would win on sheer virtuosity.
At Pescara there was a check-point and the road swung west
towards the Apennines and Rome. Portago was in an excellent position.
He had passed many cars which had started earlier and knew he was making good time. He climbed up the Apennines, punishing his car.He was fourth by then, only a minute and thirty-five seconds behind Piero Taruffi, the eventual winner.
The road plunged down into Rome—for a moment there was a, vista of the city, the spires and churches, the monumental ruins.
Portago must have felt himself enormously in tune with life as he saw it. He had beauty and speed in his hands, and love waiting for him ahead.
At Rome Miss Christian waved to him from the crowd. And then
Portago did something that was not like him — he halted in a screech of to brakes and swirling dust. Linda ran up and Portago pulled her down to as him and kissed her. He murmured something.
Valuable seconds, perhaps as long as a minute, were lost before he had regained speed and rejoined the race. Why did he stop, he who was hurrying to win above all things? Why waste seconds which so often in past Mille Miglias had meant the difference between victory and defeat?
It could have been for show — Portago was always aware of his public. Or perhaps somehow he sensed that his last kiss was more precious than all the others, and so had seized it.
Miss Christian waved to him until he was out of sight. A sudden silence filled the air. Along the road lime trees were in bloom. Their white petals fluttered towards the earth.
Portago’s car sped north towards Guidizzollo.
In the mountains again, he climbed along the broken spine of Italy, fled through the sinuous Futa and Raticosa passes, until at last the road began to fall once more. Across a fertile valley he raced towards Bologna, 200 miles from the finish and a scheduled fuel stop for the Ferrari team. There he skidded t® a halt and sprang from the car. Mechanics swarmed over it, dumping gas, checking tyres.
‘How do I stand?’
‘Fifth.’
‘How far behind?’
They told him seconds. Furthermore, two of the cars ahead were faltering and might not finish.
The gas was poured. A mechanic, grimy and sweating, writhed out from under the car. ‘Look at this!’ he cried, pointing. ‘The shaft which supports the left front wheel is cracked! The tyre is actually rubbing against the frame of the car.’
‘I hit a kerb,’ explained Portago impatiently.
He had come 8oo miles. The tormenting mountains were behind him and he had scarcely two hours left to drive. Ahead stretched a plain so flat a man could see practically to the Alps.
The shaft, the tyre, would hold. They always held. He knew of dozens of instances.
‘There isn’t time to fix it now,’ he said, and jumped into his place. The car’s unmuffled engine thundered. It leaped on to the road.
And so he raced across the valley in the sun. At Parma he passed Peter Collins’s broken Ferrari beside the road, and was fourth. By Cremona he had beaten Olivier Gendebien’s time and was third. How far ahead were the others? He roared into Mantua where the road turns north like an elbow for the last dash to the tape.
Moments later he rocketed across the narrow bridge into Goito and on the straightaway beyond it, pressed the accelerator into the floor.
Now the grey walls of Guidizzollo loomed before him, the finish line less than thirty miles ahead.
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 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 the 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 world. Jean Behra, the French driver, said: ‘Only those who do not move, do not die; but are they not already dead?’
The Mille Miglia as a road-race died with Portago, as Paris— Madrid had died with Marcel Renault fifty-four springtimes before. The Mille Miglia has indeed been run again, but reorganized into a rally and interesting almost no one. The Mule Miglia was a glorious name; it was sometimes a glorious race, and it would have been better forgotten completely until such time as the next race like it erupts somewhere, rocketing across a country in the sun, and men speak again of Paris—Madrid, Alfonso de Portago, and the great town-to-town races of the past.

[Stoffer Green]

Strad,
Fon de Portago was a dashing, exciting man, who could, as you have so eloquently described, excel at many of life's more interesting pursuits. I'm sorry to do this to you again,(as in Donington 1938), but I remember watching him in the Lancia-Ferrari at the Nurburgring in 1956 and thinking "If only I could enjoy a life as entertaining as his!"
We mustn't forget that nearly all the prominent Formula 1 drivers of that time were far more charismatic than their modern counterparts, and that he was the most glamorous of them all.

[strad]

"""I'm sorry to do this to you again,(as in Donington 1938), but I remember watching him in the Lancia-Ferrari at the Nurburgring in 1956 and thinking "If only I could enjoy a life as entertaining as his!"""
Stoffer I don't understand???
I'd love to hear anything you have to say about Portago.
You were very lucky to have witnessed him in action. Do you have anymore memories of him? Others?
I love the olden days.....I'll have to check your profile...you must be even older than me...ewwwwww that makes you really old.......HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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About 12 years older- you could be the older brother I never had- HAHAHAHAHAHA..

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Portagos life could be made into a movie...

[Stoffer Green]

Strad
Welcome to the Green family, we are four brothers already, and one more would be welcome! My youngest bro is your age and a collector of Maseratis, lucky chap. Next one up has done a lot of racing in his time, mostly Historic cars. Come and see us!