Jan Schwarz, who recently passed away, was a racing legend in the National Formula Škoda. He began his career as a driver in the late 1970s and ended it as a team owner who gave Josef Král his chance in formula racing.
Jan Schwarz from Břasy near Rokycany first sat in a Formula Škoda in Most in 1978. As a complete novice, he was nervous and didn’t know what to do. Of course, he already had racing experience. In order to be able to compete on circuits, he had to earn a performance class at district hill climb races in socialist Czechoslovakia at the time. But in Most in 1978, he was there for the first time and also for the first time with so many competitors on the track. Fortunately, he already knew another formula racing driver, František Nohýnek, who helped him. “He told me to wait for him during training, to follow him, and he would show me the track. I listened to him, and after the training was over, I looked at the times and saw that I was in third place,” Jan Schwarz recalled in Auto Sport Magazín.
With the Formula he bought two years earlier for 48,000 Czechoslovak korunas, he finished third overall in his debut season in 1978, a very impressive performance for a newcomer. But second and third places in the final standings followed him practically throughout his career, and he only won the championship title in 1995. That was with a two-year-old Delta 2 monoposto that Jan Schwarz and his colleagues built themselves – one of many.
“In the early 1980s, the technical regulations were changing, and the Filípek brothers suggested that we could build the Formula Škoda ourselves. It wasn’t easy, of course, but we believed in ourselves. There was the Favorit factory in Rokycany, where there were excellent locksmiths who could prepare and weld the right pipes, and we also had Metalex behind us, who were rooting for us. So we could build our own frame, and they confirmed that they sold it to us. We also got a lot of help from consultations with the excellent designer Václav Pauer and Albín Patlejch, but the main credit for that goes to Antonín Filípek, who drew the Formula and it worked perfectly. We started sometime in 1982, and two years later, our Delta with a Škoda engine was on the track,” Schwarz said.
A total of nine formulas were built in the workshop near Rokycany, and they also modified monoposts for other drivers. After winning the championship with the Delta 2 Formula in 1995, Schwarz decided to retire from racing and devoted himself only to “tinkering.” The last Formula that was created in his workshop was the FiKS-01, and then he focused on vintage racing.
Jan Schwarz also became an important figure in the early stages of Josef Král’s career. He put the fourteen-year-old kart racer in his Delta 2 Formula and taught him the first steps on the circuits. “Like everyone who came from karts, he had problems shifting gears. He drove for the first time on Thursday, improving lap by lap, but at the end of the day, he had the slowest time. In the evening, his father called and said that he didn’t like those times because they weren’t used to being in last place. I told him it was the first day and that I didn’t see it as a problem. So he said good, we’ll keep going. We did a lot of work the next day, and in the race, Josef confirmed his immense talent. He finished third in his debut,” Jan Schwarz recalled, who passed away at the age of 76.
foto: Auto Sport Magazín