Smooth Operator
JUST over 60 years ago in 1957, Mondial capped its mercurial rise to road-racing supremacy by winning both the 125cc and 250cc World Championships. The Italian factory then withdrew from racing at the height of its success, although two of the 250 GP bikes went on to have a second life in the hands of one of England’s most revered road racers.
Mondial was the creation of the Boselli family, wealthy land-owning nobility from the Piacenza area in the valley of the River Po, Italy’s breadbasket. Count Giuseppe Boselli treated his motorcycle business as a sideline to his agricultural interests, but as a former ISDT Gold Medal winner, he understood the value of competition success in promoting Mondial’s road bikes in sport-mad Italy. He therefore recruited designer Alfonso Drusiani in the late 1940s to create a 125GP racer. Drusiani came up with a small-scale version of the classic bevel-driven DOHC single-cylinder four-stroke, which proved literally unbeatable for the first three years of the 125cc World Championship, with Mondial riders winning all 11 GP races run in 1949-51. Nello Pagani took out the inaugural World Championship in
