Biting Jawa is celebrating its 50th birthday in Brno, where Franta Štastný rode it the best
Fifty years ago in Brno, František Štastný achieved his best home result in the World Championship. On a bike that no one believed could last the race. After half a century, the mythical Jawa 350 with the designation 637 will return to Brno. At the weekend, the Brno Grand Prix Revival festival will start at the exhibition grounds.
That bike had the ambition to lead the Czechoslovak brand Jawa to the title of world champion of road motorcycles. It was fast as hell and could compete with the best machines in the world. But her ambitions remained buried together with Bill Ivy in 1969 at the East German Sachsenring. She thus experienced her greatest few minutes of fame exactly fifty years ago on her home track with the legendary František Šťastný behind the handlebars.
The almost mythical four-cylinder two-stroke engine was completed by the engineers at the terrible Jawa factory in 1967. However, it was only in the following season that they managed to get the bike into such a condition that it could race properly. Due to the bureaucracy and the complicated import of parts from abroad, development and testing dragged on disproportionately, so in July something stood at the start of the Brno World Championship race, which journalists nicknamed the "newborn". And as fast as it was, it was unreliable.