From the archives of Bob Montgomery, motoring historian
'Fon': Don Alfonso Marquis de Portago was a superb athlete. An accomplished pilot, an expert at Jai-alai and polo, the world's number one amateur steeplechaser in 1951 and 1952 and the captain of the Spanish bobsled team in the 1952 Olympics. In addition, he held the records for one-man sled runs, yet despite all these fine athletic achievements, 'Fon' as he was affectionately known to all his many friends, never trained.
And as if all of the above were not enough to fully occupy the time of a millionaire aristocratic sportsman, Fon was also an accomplished driver of racing cars. Yet true to form, he had no interest whatsoever in the mechanical side of the racing cars he drove so fast and so brilliantly. Certainly ranked in the top 10 when he died in 1957, Fon knew so little about cars that he often had trouble telling one from another.
He once famously admitted to the American motoring writer, Ken Purdy, that he would put a scratch on some inconspicuous place on his racing car so that he could be sure to climb into the right one before the start of a race!
His approach to racing was disarmingly simple: "When I have a racing car that I'm about to drive, I walk up to it and I think, 'Now is this bloody thing going to hold together for the next 500 kilometres or is it going to kill me?' That's the only interest I have in it and as soon as the race is over, I couldn't care less what happens to it."
His friend Eddie Nelson, an American bobsled ace once predicted, "The way he goes at life, he'll never see 30." Sadly, this prediction was not only to prove true but also to cost the life of the man who made it.
In the 1957 Mille Miglia - that famous 1,000 mile race over open Italian roads - Fon found himself running as high as third in his Ferrari. Before the race he had declared that he wished only to finish but now sensing the chance to win, Fon was running right on the limit. At the Bologna service stop, the Ferrari mechanics advised changing his front tyre but Fon refused on the grounds that he could not afford the couple of minutes it would take. It was to be a fateful decision as only 40 miles from the finish of the Mille Miglia, Fon's Ferrari left the road at 175mph killing not only himself and his co-driver, Eddie Nelson, but also nine spectators while in addition, many more were seriously injured.
After this terrible crash, Fon de Portago was criticised for being impulsive and foolish and his accident and the terrible loss of life led directly to the end of the Mille Miglia series of races which had begun in 1927.
The newspapers had a field-day with lurid headlines, particularly as Fon was romantically linked with American actress Linda Christian, the ex-wife of actor Tyrone Power. She had accompanied Fon to that final Mille Miglia and watched the cars speed through Rome at the halfway stage of the race.
There, Fon - again true to form - stopped his Ferrari, leaned from it to kiss Linda and then sped off. A few hours later he was dead, the last of a line of gifted amateur playboy racing drivers who had been a part of motor racing's story right from its earliest days.