Rallying can very much be a family affair and, this weekend, Oliver Solberg will follow in the footsteps of father Petter at Rally Italia Sardinia; an event Solberg senior won the first time it was part of the World Rally Championship back in 2004.
The Solbergs are of course one of the great rallying dynasties, but Oliver isn’t the only driver in Sardinia with a family tie to that inaugural event two decades ago.
When Petter Solberg won in 2004, Armin Schwarz was also there, driving a Škoda Fabia WRC. Just like Solberg senior, Schwarz will be watching his own offspring compete on the Mediterranean island this week, as Fabio Schwarz takes on the next round of the Junior World Rally Championship.
It hasn’t been an easy year so far for Schwarz; with crashes in Sweden and Croatia, but the 19-year-old will be looking to make amends this weekend.
While Schwarz junior is very much in the early stages of his career, father Armin was coming to the end of his time as a factory driver when he piloted the Fabia in Sardinia 20 years ago. The Czech manufacturer had long been a force in the lower categories of the WRC but had joined the top tier in 1999 with the Octavia, before switching to the more compact Fabia in 2003.
Of course, the Fabia would later achieve notoriety when Colin McRae came so close to delivering a podium at Rally Australia in 2005. That dream was shattered when a clutch problem could not be repaired during service, but it had shown that, in the right hands, the Fabia had potential.
Sadly, it would remain potential unrealized, as the Škoda team folded at the end of that same year, meaning its best result with the Fabia was a pair of seventh places; one on the RAC Rally for McRae in 2005 and one in Germany for Toni Gardemeister a year earlier.
This week’s shot from the Girardo & Co archive shows Schwarz in full flight during that first visit to Sardinia in 2004. It would be an extremely difficult weekend for the team, as neither Schwarz nor team-mate Gardemeister would make it to the finish.
Schwarz’s rally was ended by suspension failure on the second day, while Gardemeister had suffered a similar fate on the very first stage.
It was tough at the top for Škoda but, just as they’d made a name for themselves in the lower categories prior to the WRC program, they would do so again in the years afterwards. The Fabia S2000 took three Intercontinental Rally Challenge titles between 2010 and 2012, while drivers of successive R5 and Rally2 versions have won eight of the last nine WRC2 championships.
Just as the factory Škoda team would close its doors at the end of 2005, Schwarz’s full-time career would conclude along with it. Just like Solberg however, he now gets to watch his son follow on his footsteps to perhaps create another rallying dynasty.
