Did the Crash Scene in 'Ferrari' Really Happen?

'Ferrari'

This post contains spoilers for the movie Ferrari.

As awards season heats up, so does the buzz surrounding Ferrari, Michael Mann’s latest opus. Based on Brock Yates’ 1991 biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine, the film tells the story of Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), who founded his namesake luxury car company in 1939.

Mann’s film focuses on the year 1957, at which point Ferrari decided to enter his racing team into the Mille Miglia, an open-road distance race held in Italy. At the time, Ferrari was also struggling with the death of his son Dino, who died of Duchenne muscular dystrophy at age 24. Dino’s death put an enormous strain on Ferrari’s marriage to his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), as did the fact that he was having an affair with a woman named Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), with whom he shared son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese).

As viewers will soon learn, however, the Mille Miglia did little to ease Ferrari the man’s woes. A fatal crash during the race killed nine spectators and soon led to the permanent end of the Mille Miglia. Ferrari, meanwhile, stood trial for manslaughter.

“Everything he’s been collides with what he might become, and the company has gone bust,” Mann said of the movie during an August 2023 interview with Variety. “His wife finds out about the other woman. It’s a spectacularly operatic melodrama in real life.”

The “real life” portion is key here—Mann took some liberties with the details, of course, but the Mille Miglia crash is depicted in gruesome detail. “All I can say is that is exactly how it happened,” Mann told Variety when asked about how he directed the scene in the film.

Keep reading for the true story behind the crash in Ferrari.

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What is the Mille Miglia?

The Mille Miglia—Italian for “thousand miles”—was an open-road motorsport endurance race established in 1927 by Count Francesco Mazzotti and Count Aymo Maggi. The event spanned two days and followed a round-trip route from the northern city of Brescia to Rome and back that roughly totaled 1,000 miles. The race was notoriously dangerous, with a total of 56 people (including spectators) dying over the course of the event’s 30-year history.

What happened at the 1957 Mille Miglia?

The Mille Miglia was often dangerous to both drivers and spectators, but the 1957 edition of the race was unusually deadly because of one crash in particular. The first crash killed Ferrari driver Alfonso de Portago, his co-driver and navigator Edmund Nelson and nine spectators in the village of Guidizzolo in the Lombardy region. A second crash killed driver Joseph Göttgens in Brescia.

How did the 1957 Mille Miglia crash happen?

Less than 30 miles from the finish line in Brescia, Spanish driver Alfonso de Portago’s front tire exploded while he was driving more than 150 miles per hour. He lost control of the vehicle and hit a telephone pole and was killed immediately before the vehicle jumped over a brook and hit several spectators. His car then bounced back on the pavement and hit several more race viewers before landing in a canal on the other side of the road.

Prior to the race, de Portago had been apprehensive about participating because he thought it would be impossible for a driver (even one with a navigator) to know every detail of the race over such a long course. He and his navigator, Nelson, had entered the Mille Miglia twice before but had never completed it. On their first attempt, their car caught fire hours into the race, and on their second try, they hit a mile marker within the first few minutes.

Dutch driver Joseph Göttgens, meanwhile, crashed his car into a wall in Florence.

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How many people died in the 1957 Mille Miglia crash?

A total of 13 people died in the 1957 Mille Miglia. Both de Portago and Nelson died in the Ferrari crash, as did nine spectators (five of whom were children), and 20 more spectators were injured. In addition to Göttgens, a motorcycle policeman died during the race, bringing the death toll to 13.

Is the Mille Miglia still raced?

The short answer is no—at least not in the same format that it was in 1957. Three days after the 1957 race ended, the Italian government banned racing on all public streets in the country and decreed the end of the Mille Miglia. From 1958 to 1961, a rally-like version of the race happened, with drivers forced to run at legal speeds with a few special sections where they could drive at racing speed. In 1977, the race was revived as the Mille Miglia Storica, which is a parade for cars manufactured before 1957.

What happened to Enzo Ferrari after the 1957 Mille Miglia crash?

Following de Portago’s crash at the 1957 Mille Miglia, Ferrari was charged with manslaughter and “causing grievous bodily harm by negligence.” The prosecution accused him of using racing tires that were not equipped to handle the high speeds traveled by drivers in the race. He was ultimately acquitted of all charges, but Ferrari the company continued to be plagued by tragedy on the track, with drivers Luigi Musso and Peter Collins dying in 1958 and Wolfgang von Trips dying in 1961. “When you drive for Ferrari, you are headed one way only: for that little box under the ground,” driver Harry Schell said in 1959. (Schell died in 1960 at age 38 while racing for a rival team.)

How accurate is Ferrari’s depiction of the 1957 Mille Miglia crash?

Some critics have been harsh about the way Mann handled the crash in Ferrari, in part because the scene is quite graphic—but de Portago’s death was extremely gruesome, as his body was found in two sections. One viewer, meanwhile, described the scene as “cheesy” during a Q&A with Driver, who replied, “F–k you.”

Mann, for his part, has emphasized the importance of accuracy while promoting the film. “Everything in the movie that happened, happened within 500 meters of everything else,” he told The Guardian in December 2023. “The barber’s shop is round the corner; the hotel Enzo went to for drinks is opposite; the opera is next door. And he never wanted to go anyplace else. He even stopped going to races and never left the country. So, you have to try and build that sense of intense compression into one neighborhood, making the location that the action is going to take place in as believable and real as possible.”

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