20072007|
In the summer of 1963 two JAWA-drivers, Gottfried Herzan and Franz "Johnny"
Knittl met at the lokal dealers shop and after chatting a while, they
decided to found a club to get cheaper spare-parts and to help one
another maintaining and repairing the bikes, after a while some other JAWA enthusiasts joined them -
the JAWA CLUB WIEN was born.
The general-board elected Franz Knittl as the first president of the JAWA CLUB WIEN in 4th of September 1963. Let's also say thanks to a man who sponsored our club from the very beginning and always had a helping hand for our problems: Mr. Josef Faber (died in 2004), who was the importer of JAWA/CZ in Austria! The racing 60's...The JAWA 350 was a bike with very good handling and ideally suited for the narrow roads and corners of the hillclimb-racetracks in those days.A good example is the former racetrack "Dopplerhuette" near Vienna where Franz Hamedl in 5 events not only won his class -350ccm, but reached the top-time among all motorcycle classes! The drivers of the JAWA CLUB WIEN dominated the races in the 250 and 350ccm classes in the 60's, but there were not only JAWA/CZ allowed, the clubmembers took part in races also with MAICO, PUCH, BULTACO or TRIUMPH in other categories. Austrian Champions of JAWA CLUB WIEN:
But the Club had a lot more successful members in this time, such as Heinrich Schuch (Sidecar Hillclimb), Heinz Zimmermann (Speedway) and Fritz Hamedl (Endurance 350ccm) as well as Karl Zeitler (Endurance 250ccm) who became Austrian Vice-Champions. The 70's and 80's...At the end of the 60's the motorcycle-boom started and the performance of the bikes became better and better. The racetracks of the 60's became too dangerous for the new, fast bikes, the new racetracks were to fast for the tuned-up JAWA's and the costs of the japanese production-racers to expensive for our clubmembers. So they started to take part in Trialevents and the first sidecar-trial in austria was organized by the JAWA CLUB WIEN at 14th of March 1970 and in 1972 Roland Georgieff with passenger Kolinsky won the Austrian Sidecar-Trial championship. But further on, there was no Sammy Miller or Balesteros among us, so the emphatic phase lasted not to long but started again later in the 80's when the Club purchased a Ossa 350 Trialbike for the use of our members. In the middle of the 70's a new kind of motorcycle-racing for "not-so-rich-people" was born: Motorcycle-Slaloms. The members of the JAWA CLUB WIEN took part in this events from the very beginning and mostly the other competitors were glad to reach a second or third place when for example our clubmembers Peter Brosig, Peter Schmid, Franz Doiber, Gerhard Legner and Peter Augustin took part in the event. We had a lot of Norton's (Commando 750 and 850) in those days, most members changed from JAWA to other brands. In Road-races and Hillclimb-races a handful of members tried to hold the JCW-flag high, such as Peter Schmid, Roland Nestler, Helmut Steinwendner, Roman Spielauer and Peter Augustin, but unfortunatly there are not topresults in racing to report. |