Praga

Sometime in September 1928, an engineer named Jaroslav František Koch climbed onto a motorcycle he himself had designed and pointed it north out of Rome, toward Prague. By most accounts he covered the 1,480 kilometers in 35 hours and 40 minutes, though at least one source puts it at 35 hours and 45 minutes — the kind of small discrepancy that tends to survive when a story gets retold for nearly a century. Either way, it was a punishing, unsupported ride across the Alps and half of Central Europe on a bike with a double-overhead-camshaft single-cylinder engine, at a time when most motorcycles on the road were still running side-valve thumpers that struggled to hold a steady 60 kilometers per hour. Koch's machine wore the badge of Praga, a Czech company that had never intended to build motorcycles at all, and that would only build them for four years. It remains one of the more curious short chapters in European motorcycling: a firm that entered the two-wheeled world almost by accident, built something genuinely advanced, and then walked away.

Origins in Prague

Praga was founded in 1907, not as a motorcycle company but as a carmaker, born out of a venture between the entrepreneur František Ringhoffer and 1. českomoravská továrna na stroje — the "First Bohemian-Moravian Machine Works," a firm that would later become part of the sprawling ČKD industrial group. Ringhoffer's involvement was brief; he departed the partnership around 1908, roughly a year after the venture began. In 1909 the trade name Praga was formally adopted — the Latin form of "Prague" — and the company set about building cars, some of them under license from the Italian firm Isotta Fraschini. From early on, Praga's engineering ambitions ran wider than automobiles: the company also produced engines and gearboxes for aircraft and, eventually, for tanks. It was an engineering house first, and a marque second, which turns out to matter a great deal for how the motorcycle story unfolds.

The Merger That Made a Motorcycle Company

Praga had no motorcycle program of its own when, in 1929, it merged with ČKD, by then one of the largest engineering combines in Czechoslovakia. That merger brought with it the ailing firm Breitfeld-Danek, and with Breitfeld-Danek came an engineer named Jaroslav František Koch — the same man who would later ride his own design over the Alps. Koch was not new to motorcycles. In 1923 he had already built a machine of his own, the JFK, powered by a 350cc overhead-cam engine with its crankshaft mounted longitudinally, an unusual layout for the period. When Breitfeld-Danek hired him, he went further, drawing up in 1926 a 500cc double-overhead-camshaft single with no real precedent in production motorcycle design at the time. That engine, developed under the Breitfeld-Danek "BD" designation, is what Praga inherited — fully formed and ready to race — when the corporate dust of the ČKD merger settled in 1929.

The BD 500 and Praga's Brief Golden Era

The BD 500 was, by any honest measure, a serious piece of engineering for its era. The twin-cam cylinder head was fully enclosed and self-lubricating, an arrangement that kept maintenance to a minimum at a time when valve gear on most motorcycles was exposed, oily, and in need of constant attention. The engine and gearbox were unit construction, sharing a wet sump, yet the gearbox itself could be removed from the side of the machine without pulling the engine out of the frame — a practical touch that mattered enormously to anyone who actually had to service these things in the field. The wheels were quick-detachable and interchangeable, and the rear wheel could be pulled even with a sidecar attached, without disturbing the chain. None of this was showmanship; it was the work of an engineer solving problems that owners and mechanics actually had.

Praga rebranded the BD as its own in 1929, and it quickly built a following well beyond racing circles. Police forces and military units liked its durability. Sidecar operators liked its torque and reliability. It handled poor roads without complaint, and it developed a reputation as much for endurance as for outright speed — a reputation Koch's own Rome-to-Prague run only cemented. In 1932 Praga expanded the range with the BC, a smaller 350cc machine with a single overhead camshaft, shaft drive, and a pressed-steel frame — a more subdued, utilitarian companion to the BD's flagship engineering.

It did not last. Czechoslovakia's motorcycle market in the early 1930s was crowded with cheaper, simpler two-stroke machines from Jawa, ČZ, and Ogar, and a hand-built double-overhead-cam single, however sophisticated, could not compete on price against bikes that cost a fraction to produce and buy. Sales slowed, and in 1933 — barely four years after the BD 500 first wore Praga badges — the company discontinued motorcycle production entirely. Praga's engineering effort simply shifted back to where it had always been strongest: cars, trucks, and heavy machinery.

Racing and the Rome-to-Prague Ride

What racing history Praga has is inseparable from that one endurance ride, and from the engine's broader reputation in competition. The BD 500 was successful in touring and endurance events, prized for the same qualities that made it a favorite with police and military buyers — it simply kept running when lesser machines gave up. Koch's own ride from Rome to Prague in 1928, covering 1,480 kilometers in something like 35 hours and 40 minutes (sources differ by a few minutes on the exact figure), stands as the marque's signature competitive achievement, not because it was a sanctioned race but because it demonstrated, in the most direct way possible, what the engine could survive. Decades later, auction house Bonhams would describe the BD engine as "absolutely superb… so good that it had great success in most branches of motor cycle sport, despite being produced in the relatively small numbers associated with such high-end engines" — a fair summary of a machine that never had the sales volume to match its engineering.

War, Nationalization, and a Long Silence

Praga's motorcycle chapter closed in 1933, but the company's broader story kept grinding forward through some of the harshest decades in Central European industrial history. World War II destroyed much of the factory infrastructure. Under the communist government that followed, state planners judged Praga better suited to producing trucks, heavy machinery, and military equipment than passenger cars or motorcycles, and the marque spent the postwar decades as an industrial workhorse rather than a maker of machines enthusiasts would seek out. The former state enterprise was eventually privatized in 1992, re-emerging as Prague Hostivař.

There are accounts, not independently confirmed beyond a handful of sources, that a motorcycle division was revived within the company at some point in the 1990s, with prototype off-road machines reportedly shown at an Autotec exhibition in Brno — timed, fittingly, to an anniversary of Praga's founding. If that revival happened as described, it apparently produced four-stroke off-road bikes of Praga's own design alongside models built around Jawa two-stroke engines, including 400cc and 610cc four-stroke variants that saw some international competition use. What's better established is that this second motorcycle era, whatever its exact shape, did not last either: production is reported to have ceased in 2003. Accounts of a subsequent sale — with the company said to have been acquired by a buyer who established the VM Motor brand and sold a 610F motocross model — exist but are thinly sourced, and should be treated as provisional rather than settled history.

Praga Today

The Praga name never disappeared; it simply moved on to other things. In its current form, the company is known chiefly for high-performance racing cars, go-karts, and aircraft components — engineering pursuits that would feel familiar to the firm that once built tank and aircraft gearboxes alongside its automobiles. But in 2023, Praga returned to motorcycles in a way that closed the loop on its own history rather cleverly. The Praga ZS 800 was introduced as a modern reinterpretation of the 1928 BD 500, built by the same engineering group responsible for the Praga Bohema hypercar. The ZS 800 borrows the character and visual details of Koch's original twin-cam single while wrapping them around contemporary racing-derived materials and production methods. Praga set the run at just 28 units, with orders opening for deliveries beginning in mid-2023 and the first machine reportedly bound for a client in Dubai.

It's a strange, appropriate way for the marque to reappear. Praga never was a volume motorcycle maker, not in 1929 and not now. What it has always had, on the two occasions it built motorcycles at all, is an engineer's instinct for doing something harder than it needed to be and doing it well. The BD 500 didn't need a fully enclosed, self-lubricating twin-cam head to sell to sidecar users and country policemen — but Jaroslav Koch built one anyway, then rode it across a continent to prove the point. Nearly a century later, the ZS 800 exists for much the same reason: not because the market demanded 28 more motorcycles from a Czech engineering house better known for race cars, but because somewhere in Prague, someone still thought the story was worth finishing properly.