19 Nov RIP RONAN SCHULZ
Some men live extraordinary lives, yet with so little fuss and fanfare that only those closest to them know what they achieved. One such was Ronan Schulz, who passed away as he had lived, in the early hours of Tuesday 11 November, after suffering a massive heart attack at the age of 72.
Ronan was one of four racing Schulz brothers from Gauteng, all of whom competed in the most demanding motorcycle racing discipline of them all – 250cc two-stroke Grand Prix bikes. The third of the four brothers (Richard, William, Ronan and Rory), he began his racing career as a teenager on a 50cc two-stroke Yamaha at the Isando Raceway in Kempton Park.
In the early 1970s he graduated to Kyalami, riding a Yamaha TZ250 in both Regional and National series. The highlight of his career, he said, was qualifying for the wet 1983 South African 250cc Grand Prix at Kyalami. In the image below he is seen together with works Kawasaki rider Anton Mang.
He didn’t finish the race, but sharing the track with the world’s top riders, he felt, was a privilege.
In 1987 Ronan broke his foot in a crash at Sunset and decided to hang up his helmet; his love for the temperamental, highly strung Grand Prix two-strokes never waned, however. In 2002 began restoring a 1984 Yamaha TZ250L, with which he took part in the Day of the Champions at Zwartkops every year from 2005 to 2018.
Ronan and his wife Isabel relocated to Cape Town in 2022, to within the sound of Killarney; he often tinkered in his son Brendan’s motorcycle workshop but never rode a motorcycle on the road, saying he simply didn’t enjoy it.
The era of the red hot two-strokes is gone now. So too, sadly, is Ronan Schulz, whose happy place was the narrow power band of a Grand Prix machine. Our thoughts and prayers are with Isabel, Brendan, his sister Alanna and the extended Schulz family in this difficult time.
