This article contains spoilers for true events dramatized in Michael Mann's Ferrari.
After winning the 1957 Mille Miglia for Ferrari, Piero Taruffi made two bold statements: He retired from racing, and wrote an article titled “Stop Us Before We Kill Again.” Published in The Saturday Evening Post, the piece was the veteran driver’s plea for open-road races like the Mille Miglia to “be put to death.” The incident that inspired this clarion call provides the gut-wrenching climax of director Michael Mann’s Ferrari.
Enzo Ferrari, often referred to as Commendatore, is said to be the most significant automotive industry figure of the 20th century, and the importance of his Maranello-based firm to the Italian people cannot be understated. Fans of its racing team are referred to as ‘tifosi’, which simply means ‘fan.’ It’s as if there is no question that if one is Italian and a motorsport fan, then one intrinsically supports the world-famous scarlet beasts emblazoned with the prancing-horse insignia, not Maserati or Alfa Romeo.
The firm’s influence reaches far beyond Italy’s borders. “Ask a child to draw a car,” Ferrari once mused, “and certainly he will draw it red.” Formula 1, the world’s most prestigious racing promotion, pays the Italian constructor a Heritage Bonus each year just for participating.
Mann’s much-anticipated return to the big screen shows us Enzo Ferrari, played by Adam Driver, at a time of existential crisis for himself and his company. In the film, Ferrari scoffs at his competitors like Jaguar who races to sell cars, while he only sells cars to race. As financial woes threaten the Commendatore’s firm, death’s incursions into his life become more frequent.
The dangers of motorsport made him no stranger to the fragile nature of mortality, but the passing of his son drained much of the man’s empathy. In Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine, the biography on which the film’s screenplay is based, automotive journalist Brock Yates identifies this as the catalyst of Ferrari’s more cynical and stoic attitude towards death. “Enzo build a wall or Enzo go do something else,” explains Ferrari in the film.
When Ferrari learns that racing driver Eugenio Castellotti has died during a testing session, he immediately asks about the condition of his car. As his ceaseless quest for performance and domination pushed the speedometer’s limit, the deaths of drivers in his stable, or Scuderia, also became more rapid.
Taruffi, nicknamed the Silver Fox and appropriately played by Patrick Dempsey, estimated 60 percent of drivers he raced with were killed in accidents. It was a time when not wearing your seatbelt was safer than buckling-up. Drivers had a better chance of surviving if they were thrown from the cockpit. They preferred the injuries suffered as their bodies bounced and skidded on the tarmac to finding themselves trapped in, or under, a petrol-filled casket on wheels.
The push was for faster cars, and less so for the safety of the drivers or spectators. The barrier separating audiences from the road, when there was one, resembled the waist-high wall on the first-base line of a baseball field. The devastating consequences of the sport’s unbridled pursuit of speed reached a breaking point at the 1955 Le Mans race. Mike Hawthorne, who would later drive for Ferrari, unexpectedly turned for a pit stop forcing another car to swerve into the path of Frenchman Pierre Levegh's speeding Mercedes-Benz. The Benz sailed into the air, exploded as it hurdled the low barrier where it barreled into the grandstand, and pelted the dense crowd with its disintegrating chassis. When it was all over, Levegh lay dead along with 82 spectators, with 120 left injured.
It remains the most catastrophic crash in motorsport history and greatly contributed to the mounting concerns over the safety of participants and bystanders. Mercedes-Benz withdrew from competing in all motorsport until 1989. Switzerland’s ban on motor racing after the incident was finally lifted this year.
Le Mans, which is still run and held in high regard today, is a closed-circuit race, meaning it’s run on a track or on closed public roads. Drivers compete by racing laps of the circuit, which tend to be less than 10 miles long. Maintenance of the road is manageable as well as the ability to provide some protection to its spectators.
Open-road races are too sprawling to offer the same. They take place from city-to-city on public roads. Spectators gather on the unprotected roadsides as they do for the Tour de France. The lauded and treacherous Carrera Panamericana was an open road race, during which 27 competitors died in its five year existence; it was cancelled following the Le Mans disaster.
The Mille Miglia consisted of 1000 miles and 4000 curves around the heart of Italy. The race captured the imagination of the Italian public as they poured out in the millions, eager to catch the colorful blurs whiz by as their prosaic thoroughfares became battlegrounds for the world’s fastest cars. But over the years, as the horsepower of the engines involved intensified, the extremely narrow, winding, and poorly-surfaced roads became less suitable.
The race already had a lethal history; a 1938 crash took 10 lives. Knives were out, and another incident could mean that the checkered flag might fall in Brescia for the final time. Taruffi promised his wife the ‘57 Mille Miglia would be his last race.
Mann offers a thoughtful illustration of the drivers before the race, each of them penning their potential goodbyes to loved ones. The scene mirrors those of soldiers writing home before battle, equating the uncertain fate both share. One driver in the Scuderia, Fon de Portago, would not race the Mille Miglia had it not been demanded by the Commendatore himself. “My early death may come next Sunday,” he ominously wrote to the model Dorian Leigh.
Portago, played by rising-star Gabriel Leone, is a strong candidate for most interesting man in history. His full name was Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, Marquis de Portago, a fitting handle for a maximalist bon vivant. He was the prototype for the man we picture in our heads when we imagine an international playboy racecar driver —the one with a rakish smile who craves adventure and gorgeous women. He raced cars, horses, and bobsleds, competing for Spain in the Winter Olympics. Mann includes a subtle nod to his aristocratic lineage when Ferrari refers to a customer as “Your Highness” and Portago replies, “Which Highness?”
The car Portago drove in the ’57 Mille Miglia was capable of reaching 180 miles per hour, the same speed Ferrari’s Formula 1 cars hit today. Portago was greeted at the Rome checkpoint by the actress (and technically the first Bond girl) Linda Christian, with whom he shared a passionate smooch. The foreboding moment was captured in an infamous photograph titled The Kiss of Death. We see this final embrace in Mann’s film before Portago’s woeful demise provides the film’s climax.
At the final checkpoint, Portago waves off a set of new tires because he is losing to a slower car. As he darts toward the finish line, he passes through the town of Guidizzolo, where the residents line the roads. Just 30 miles from the checkered flag, Portago’s 4.1-liter Tipo 335 loses control and becomes a two-ton scarlet pinwheel with a V-12 engine. It ricochets out of a roadside bank before slamming into a pole, ripping through a crowd of spectators, and finally ending its gruesome havoc in a drainage ditch.
The sequence in the film is brief but breathtaking, as it would be if it happened right in front of you. It elicits the visceral response to such a horror with artful carnage. Mann’s non-fetishistic attention to detail avoids any lurid thrills a more superficial portrayal might exploit.
When the dust settled, the bodies of Portago and his navigator lay scattered on the ground along with ten spectators including five children. Many newspapers joined the Vatican in demanding the end of the Mille Miglia, while some motorsport reporters lamented the calls to discontinue the decades-long tradition as emotional and hasty. “It was Le Mans all over again,” wrote Taruffi in his excoriating article. “I tried to look as a victor should look, but in my heart there was only despair, for I realized that the Mille Miglia had become too dangerous and that I must be one of its pallbearers."
1957 was the 24th and final edition of the Mille Miglia. It exists now only as an exhibition of historic cars.
While constructors continue their attempts to outwit physics and manipulate aerodynamics, a half-century of safety protocols and innovation have caught up to the developments in speed. Death is no longer a near-inevitability, for drivers or spectators.
The growing popularity of Formula 1 in the United States means there are now three grand prix races that take place on American circuits (by contrast, France and Germany have none). Fans can enjoy Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz dance their Ferraris around circuits in Austin, Miami, and the Las Vegas strip, with relative comfort regarding their safety.
The death of Jules Bianchi in 2014 is a poingant reminder that while fatalities are fewer and further between, they still occur. But even through horrific incidents like Zhou Guayou’s turn one crash at Silverstone in 2022 and Romain Grosjean's fireball in 2020, drivers can walk away with minor injuries.
Scuderia Ferrari continues to be the most popular team in motorsport today. Its car won this year’s Le Mans and despite its current struggles in Formula 1, the Tifosi usually outnumber all other teams' supporters.
And just for fun, close your eyes and picture a race car.
What color is it?
