Petrolicious, the creator of quality, original films and articles for classic car enthusiasts, has released its latest video, featuring Camillo Mekacher-Vogel’s Ferrari 365 GTS/4, aka the legendary Daytona Spyder.
After a couple of years away, the Petrolicious website and YouTube Channel has been recently rebooted by duPont REGISTRY Group, and new films are now dropping every Friday. 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 Camillo’s story…
The Ferrari Daytona is one of the legends. For some, it is akin to an automotive sacred cow. It is a machine born from victory and rebellion. It’s from an era of excess, flair, and audacity that would never come again. A Ferrari Daytona Spyder, already steeped in myth, should feel like a portal back to the moment it first rolled onto the streets. But what happens when every inch of it is refreshed, repainted, and reimagined?
That’s the battle at the heart of Camillo Mekacher-Vogel’s Ferrari Daytona Spyder. A Fly Yellow, one of one European-spec Daytona, delivered new to a royal family in the Middle East before vanishing into obscurity. When it resurfaced decades later, its fate teetered on a knife’s edge. The easy path, the one so many owners take, would have been a flawless by the book restoration. Every imperfection erased, every part refreshed to be better than new. But Camillo saw something else. This car didn’t need to be perfect. It needed to be real. So began the fool’s errand against the inevitable, time, a fight not to restore but to preserve.
“We really wanted to maintain every possible original component,” Camillo explained. “Even the smallest details, like the original dashboard, are becoming increasingly rare in a world where everything gets over-restored.” The safe option would have been just to replace any original component that was slightly blemished, but we wanted to keep the car as honest as possible. The judges at Cavallino understood that.”
The battle lines were clear. The engine bay, instead of being refinished into a glossy, factory fresh display, was carefully cleaned piece by piece. If someone in fifty years wants to know what an original Ferrari engine looked like, there will be very few left to show them. The dashboard, typically one of the first casualties in a restoration, remained intact, with every fragile, factory flaw left untouched. And where others would have swapped out components for pristine replacements, Camillo and team chose the harder road, keeping what was there, even if it wasn’t perfect.
The car’s revival took months of careful work, bouncing between continents, its original wheels flying back and forth across the Atlantic to be properly restored in Italy, while Camillo flew between Milan and Wisconsin, where Motion Products carefully pieced the Daytona back together. Time was against them. The plan was to unveil the car at Cavallino Classic, the most prestigious Ferrari concours in the world.
“We immediately had this dream of presenting it at Cavallino,” Camillo recalled, “but at the same time, you have to respect an event like that and do your very best to present the car properly. We knew it was a risk, but we also knew it was the right thing to do.”
Would they understand the point? Would they see the car not as flawed, but as honest? “People went wild over it,” Camillo recalled. “The fact that this car had been used, had been driven, had lived, it made it stand out even more among all the flawless restorations. It was a labor of love. We had the right people, the right vision, and the right car. Seeing it recognized that way, after all the effort we put into keeping it real, that was everything.”
Camillo Mekacher-Vogel’s Daytona didn’t just win. It dominated:
· Platinum Award, the concours equivalent of a heavyweight belt. The highest honor, certifying its authenticity and excellence.
· Best in Class for Ferrari Spiders. Beating flawless, fully restored examples.
· Gentlemen’s Choice, meaning some well-dressed guys with no socks just really, really liked it. A win not by technicality, but by sheer presence.
