Petrolicious, the creator of quality, original films and articles for classic car enthusiasts, has released its latest video, featuring Camillo Mekacher-Vogel – who owns the only Dagrada Giannini 750 Sport left in the world.
Petrolicious celebrates the inventions, the personalities, and the aesthetics that ignite a collective lust for great automotive machines, and it seeks to inform, entertain, and inspire its community of aficionados and pique the interest of those who have been missing out.
Today, Petrolicious takes up the incredible story…
The war was over, but the world hadn’t settled. In Italy, 1949 wasn’t peace, not really. It was survival in a different key. The country was still picking gravel out of its teeth. Steel that once framed bombers was being melted down for scooters and sewing machines. Entire families lived in single rooms with curtains for doors.
North of Milan, just before the land tips into the Alps, was a strip of country still wrapped in soot. Factories ran hot again, producing parts for trains, tools, appliances, anything that could be sold, anything someone needed. The region had money, but not much. Pride, but not loud. It was a place of people who worked with their hands and stayed out of photographs.
The car’s origin was as unpolished as its aluminum skin. Dagrada wasn’t a company so much as it was a man. Angela Dagrada. He didn’t just lend his name. He built the cars. Welded the frames. Shaped the bodies. Then climbed in and raced them. Mille Miglia. Club events. Hill climbs. Whatever he could afford. The workshop was probably more aviation garage than assembly line. Tube steel, rivets, intuition. Not everything had a drawing. Some things just felt right.
We don’t know much about Angela Dagrada. No interviews. No memoirs. No tidy archive of production numbers or postwar exploits. And maybe that’s the point. Italy’s hills and alleyways were filled with one man marques after the war. These were small operations that flared up and burned bright, if briefly. Men who weren’t trying to start legacies. They were just building the fastest thing they could imagine with the tools they had. Dagrada was one of them. Maybe one of the best.
Siata, Nardi, OSCA, these names echo now, but many others vanished completely. After the war, a strange kind of energy spread through Italy’s workshops and garages. There was leftover machinery, idle hands, and an aching need to go fast again. Materials were scarce, but ambition wasn’t. Small constructors sprang up almost organically, fueled by mechanical know-how, racing dreams, and just enough aluminum left to shape a body or two. The national racing scene gave them somewhere to go, and the public’s hunger for motion gave them a reason to exist. This wasn’t just cultural, it was integral. Italy’s motorsport ecosystem at the time supported it. The Mille Miglia and countless local hillclimbs gave small builders real platforms. There were few regulations and low barriers to entry. You didn’t need a factory. You needed a welder, a shed, and something worth driving.
These were builders not aiming for volume or legacy. They were chasing something more immediate. Speed, escape, relevance. The cars weren’t side projects. They were survival with curves and velocity. They lived in garages, raced in the foothills, and died on paper. Dagrada didn’t. One of his cars survived. As far as anyone knows, this is it. The only Dagrada Giannini 750 Sport left in the world. If there were others, they’ve disappeared. Misfiled in history. Broken for parts. Rebodied, rebadged, forgotten.
There were others like it in postwar Italy. Siata, Nardi, OSCA. Dozens of little garages, each with a dream and maybe enough aluminum for two bodies. But Dagrada was different. Not louder. Just more focused. The Dagrada 750 Sport wasn’t a scaled-down racer. It was a scalpel. Built with precision, without pretense. “There’s not a single part on this car that’s trying to impress you,” Camillo says. “It was built to do something, not say something.”
The numbers are almost irrelevant compared to the romance and enigma of it, but they’ll still make you raise an eyebrow. 340 kilograms. 60 horsepower. Giannini 750 engine, twin-choke. That’s 12.5 pounds per horsepower. It would smoke a Porsche 356 (roughly 18.5 lbs/hp), an early 911T (about 18.2 lbs/hp), and run neck-and-neck with a modern Mazda Miata (about 16.5 lbs/hp). The numbers give it context, but they don’t explain it. It raced more than 30 times. Landed on the podium in half. Won a third. That’s not folklore. That’s ledger. “When I started researching its past, I couldn’t believe how often it showed up in period records,” Camillo says. “This wasn’t some garage experiment—it was competitive.”
The original owner didn’t commission it. He came across it the way you stumble into something that already knows you. After the war, he returned home with 19 confirmed aerial victories. A pilot who survived the desert skies of North Africa and flew with precision, not luck. A true ace. A man looking for a different kind of machine to test his nerve.
His name was Franco Bordoni-Bisleri. The war gave him his speed and grit. Italy gave him a reason to keep using it. The planes were quiet now. But the machines, the right kind of machines, were still out there. He started racing. Maseratis, at first. Then something else. Something lighter. More alive. “It was like a bird,” he’d later say.
Driving it is closer to flying than anyone has the right to expect. You sit on the axle. The car doesn’t filter the road, it prints it on your spine. Startup is a ceremony. No choke. No key and twist. You open the engine bay. Manually fill the carbs. Wait for the fuel pump. Blip the linkage by hand while pulling a lever inside. It only runs when you ask it the right way. “You don’t just start it,” Camillo says. “You negotiate with it. And if you rush it, it lets you know.”
“It’s something between a motorcycle and a car,” says Camillo Mekacher-Vogel, the current steward. “You feel it has so much grip… until it no longer has it.” He laughs when people ask if he’s worried someone might steal it. “If they can start it, they deserve to drive it.”
Every inch of the body is hand-hammered. You can see the impact points if you look close. They didn’t buff the history out. “Every dent is part of its timeline,” Camillo says. “You take that away, you take away the memory of what it did.” Underneath, it’s all mechanical purity. No part of the car hides what it does. It was made to be fixed. No computers, no abstractions. There’s nowhere to source parts. You break it, you fix it.
Franco’s callsign during the war was Robur. Latin for strength. He kept it after the war, and a drink by the same name is still sold in Italy. He lived a life that needed speed. Angela Dagrada gave it to him.
Cars like this weren’t just built. They were needed. By men who didn’t want to go slow. By countries trying to remember who they were. There’s no nostalgia in the welds. No corporate committee signed off on the curve of the fenders. It’s the opposite of modern. It’s what happens when soul matters more than software.
Today, it survives not as a museum piece, but as a living thing. Camillo drives it. Maintains it. Keeps it uncomfortable, raw, honest. It doesn’t exist to be admired. It exists to be understood.
