"You could feel it. It started as soon as you crossed the border, the car almost started to fall apart because the roads were just very bad. When I first crossed here it was a real shock. It was a completely different world. Just from the outside looking in. There you have houses that are white, clean and the gardens are beautifully landscaped. And then you come here and you see these... I don't know what it was. If there were other colours or if they were mixed in a strange way. Every color that was on the house, I'm talking about the front walls now, was kind of gray. No matter if it was reddish or greenish, they were all kind of a uniform grey. I always felt that somehow people didn't have the money to do something nice. Even though some of them tried really hard. So you could see that somewhere in between there were really great gardens where people had tried and forged really great pots for flowers out of a few things or something. That was something that I always thought was great here. Whatever problem you had, especially in the Škoda team, someone always found a solution."
"What we had to leave for the customs officers were stickers. Anything that was in some way a sticker, whether it was motoring, cosmetic, whatever. And plastic bags. So you had to put them in the car so that they could be seen from the outside, and then you could see them walking around, looking and - ah, what's in there? You could actually see him waiting for someone to take out a couple of stickers and give them to him. That's what I remember, the stickers, because I thought, well, there's no way that somebody would do something for stickers or give you something for stickers. We used to... Well, the pubs here used to close very early, at eight or nine o'clock, and we were usually ten, twelve, twenty people eating and wanting to order something to drink and so on, and it was always no, no. And then they always saw the stickers and for five stickers we could stay an hour longer. I was embarrassed sometimes because I thought that sticker was worthless to us. But here it was currency in a way."
"I once drove the RAC Rally, which is a World Championship race, with Svatopluk Kvaizar. And he doesn't speak a word of English, nor a word of German. I had already learned Czech for two years, but after two years of Czech you can say something like: hello, goodbye, where is the toilet, where is the train and where is the station. That's all I knew. And yet, because of the advertising in England, they wanted me to join the team, but John went with Jan-Olof Bohlin and none of the other Czech riders dared to ride with me. So Sváťa got me. But somehow we managed. First of all, we had a radio in the car, which meant that we were in contact with Jiří Kotek, who spoke English and Czech and translated. Then, of course, we spoke with our hands and feet. Back then, during speed trials where you had to drive fast, there were no signs used in England yet. You had to navigate using a map or just go blind. I actually didn’t have to say much—only when an important piece of information was missing. But I did learn a few phrases: left, right, at the crossroads, caution, be very careful! I probably knew a few more words, but I’ve forgotten them by now."
Monika Ziebegk was born as Monika Eckardt on 9 August 1959 in Munich, Germany, into a family of car dealers. She has therefore been close to motoring since childhood. Although she chose to study computer science, she soon discovered a passion for motorsport, a sport in which women had previously been more sporadically involved. In her spare time, she soon established herself as a successful female co-driver in rally racing, from 1982 onwards mainly in Škoda cars. She competed in a number of successful races alongside the likes of Austrian Gerhard Kalnay, Czech Svatopluk Kvaizar and especially Norwegian legend John Haugland. She raced until 1995, when she prioritised family responsibilities. She regularly returns to the Czech Republic to visit friends and on the occasion of revival category races. We were able to record her story thanks to the financial support of the Škoda Auto Foundation from „Kultura má zelenou“ grant programme.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
