The Boselli brothers — Luigi, Carlo, Ettore, and Ada — were encouraged by their father Giuseppe Boselli, a competitive motorcyclist and co-owner of the Italian motorcycle firm GD. FB Mondial's roots lay in a workshop set up to sell and service GD models, but demand for affordable, durable machines soon pushed the family toward independent manufacturing. The key early partner was Oreste Drusiani, a respected engine builder whose farm in Bologna became the company's first production site.
Production grew steadily through the 1930s, but in July 1943 a heavy Allied bombing raid struck the Bologna railway station and its surroundings. The Drusiani farm survived the physical blast, though the machinery was commandeered by the military, halting production for the remainder of the war.
After the war, the Boselli and Drusiani families rebuilt together. FB Mondial relaunched formally in 1948, and within a single year was competing at the highest level of international motorcycle racing. At a time when rivals MV Agusta and Ducati were focused on lightweight economy machines, Mondial positioned itself as a boutique manufacturer of high-performance small-displacement motorcycles, with production typically ranging between 1,000 and 2,000 hand-built units per year.
The results on track were extraordinary. In only their second year of operation, Mondial claimed the first of what would become five World Championship titles. The company won the 125cc riders' title with Nello Pagani in 1949, Bruno Ruffo in 1950, and Carlo Ubbiali in 1951, taking the constructors' crown in each of those seasons as well. After a period of consolidation, Mondial returned to the top in 1957, winning both the 125cc and 250cc riders' championships — Tarquinio Provini in the smaller class and Cecil Sandford in the quarter-litre — and both manufacturers' titles.
At the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy, Mondial scored notable successes: Cromie McCandless won the Ultra Lightweight TT in 1951, and in 1957 Provini and Sandford claimed the Ultra Lightweight and Lightweight TTs respectively, underscoring the sweep of that final championship season.
The 1957 season carried a significance that extended well beyond the championship results. That year, Soichiro Honda personally approached Count Boselli to purchase a Mondial racing machine. Boselli provided Honda with a 125cc racebike from the factory's just-completed championship-winning campaign. Honda used the Mondial as a benchmark for the engineering standards he intended to pursue on the world stage. To this day, an original Mondial 125cc racebike is the first motorcycle on display when entering Honda's Motegi Collection Hall.
After the 1957 Grand Prix season, the major Italian manufacturers — Gilera, Moto Guzzi, MV Agusta, and Mondial — collectively announced their withdrawal from Grand Prix competition, citing escalating costs and diminishing commercial returns. For Mondial, which had tied its identity so closely to racing success, the decision proved costly. Sales declined through the late 1950s, and in 1960 the last fully Mondial-built motorcycle left the factory. The company continued for nearly two more decades by fitting proprietary engines into Mondial frames, but this hybrid approach could not sustain the brand's earlier prestige. Production ceased entirely in 1979.
In 1999, newspaper publisher Roberto Ziletti purchased the rights to the Mondial name with the ambition of reviving it as a superbike brand. A deal with Honda — reportedly facilitated by the memory of the 1957 racebike gift — allowed Mondial to use Honda RC51 superbike engines in a new machine, the Piega 1000. However, Ziletti's attention was pulled toward the wider Lastra publishing group, and after spending more than 11 million euros on the project, the Arcore factory was placed in bankruptcy in 2004.
The brand passed through further ownership before a more durable revival began in 2014. Count Pierluigi Boselli, a descendant of the original founders and holder of the Mondial name, partnered with engineer Cesare Galli — formerly Technical Director at Fantic Motor and a veteran of World Trials Championship-winning designs — to develop a new range. The resulting HPS 125 and HPS 250 machines, built through a Zongshen-Piaggio joint venture in China, blended classic café-racer aesthetics with modern engineering. The current lineup includes naked, sport, scrambler, flat-track, motard, dual-sport, and scooter variants.
FB Mondial's racing legacy rests on an exceptionally compressed period of achievement. Five world titles in nine seasons, accomplished with hand-built machines from a factory producing fewer than 2,000 units annually, placed Mondial among the great specialist manufacturers of the early Grand Prix era. The company's influence on Honda's engineering philosophy — documented by the Motegi display — ensures that its impact extended far beyond the Italian tifosi who followed its campaigns in the late 1940s and 1950s.