Moto Park Kraków: a track meant to teach, a track of discord

On the afternoon of Tuesday 26 March 2019 a statement appeared on the Moto Park Kraków website: "Meeting the expectations of local residents, we have taken the (not easy) decision to withdraw car training sessions from our offer". Anyone who had bought a voucher for free driving sessions could exchange it for a ride in a supercar or take the money back. Less than two years after the opening, a centre that was meant to teach Kraków drivers how to control a car stopped letting them onto the track in their own cars. To understand how it came to that, one has to go back to the fields in Branice, on the eastern edge of Nowa Huta.

Location	ul. Rzepakowa 4R, Kraków, district XVIII Nowa Huta (Branice)
Type	asphalt training track with skid pads, a Driving Technique Improvement Centre
Length	at the opening 800–1200 m depending on the configuration; currently, according to the operator, up to 1950 m
Opening	driving from May 2017, official opening 8 June 2017
Originator	Michał Kościuszko, rally driver, 2009 JWRC world runner-up
Operator	Moto Park Kraków sp. z o.o. (KRS 0001034452); ODTJ Moto Park Kraków sp. z o.o. (KRS 0000631808)
Noise limit	98 dB for every vehicle entering the track
Status	active; free motorcycle training, car courses, SKJS competitions

Six million on the fields of Branice

The plan was announced on 13 September 2016. The city information service reported that work had started on a centre initiated by Michał Kościuszko, a rally driver and JWRC world runner-up who ran a driving technique school in Kraków. The announcement spoke of a track 800 or 1200 m long, three skid pads, a gravel section, training rooms and an event hall of about 400 m², as well as a karting track with an academy for children. Construction was to be finished by the end of 2016. "Gazeta Krakowska" gave the location more precisely (ul. Rzepakowa in Branice) and the cost: 6 million zloty.

The investor did not hide the calculation. Regulations were due to come into force in Poland requiring young drivers to complete additional training at Driving Technique Improvement Centres, and Małopolska had no such centre. Moto Park was to serve drivers from the whole province. Kościuszko repeated that argument later as well, when the act was still not in force: "The act obliging young drivers to take a course of several hours on a track has not come into force yet. But one day it will. The absence of such a facility in the province will be very troublesome from the drivers' point of view".

The originator himself was then three years past the end of his career in the world championship. Born in 1985 in Kraków, he began in karting, for which he was signed up by his father Jan Kościuszko, a rally and circuit driver. In 2009, at the wheel of a Suzuki Swift Super 1600, he won the Rally of Portugal and the Rally of Argentina and became the junior world runner-up (JWRC); in 2011 he was second runner-up in the PWRC classification in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X, and in 2013 he started in the top WRC class in a Mini John Cooper Works WRC and a Ford Fiesta WRC. The 2013 season was cut short by a crash on the Rally of Germany and a broken spine, after which Kościuszko disappeared from rallying for a long time.

The structure of the venture was dispersed from the start. On 11 August 2016 the company ODTJ Moto Park Kraków sp. z o.o. was registered with capital of 5,000 zloty, with Maciej Wojtas as its president and Ewelina Wojtas as a partner. A month later the limited partnership Moto Park Kraków Maciej Wojtas sp. k., since struck off, was entered in the register. The track, as "Nasze Miasto" reported in May 2017, was managed by the PROF sports club, headed by Jan Kościuszko; the club leased the land from the city for 30 years. Michał Kościuszko appeared publicly as the initiator and owner of the centre and ran his own driving school on its grounds.

Drivers came out onto the asphalt in May 2017, before any official opening had taken place. That followed on 8 June 2017; according to reports from the opening, several thousand people visited the facility in the first month. "I always dreamed of creating a facility of this kind in Kraków", Kościuszko said then, announcing an expansion with further track layouts and skid pads.

A pad shaped like the letter S

The track opened then was modest: an asphalt ribbon 6 to 10 m wide and 800 to 1200 m long, depending on how the configuration was laid out. Plus three skid pads: a rectangular one with water curtains, one shaped like a corner and one shaped like the letter S, which the operator advertised as the only one in Poland. The building held two lecture rooms, a training room, a reception and a main presentation room of 400 m². The president of the PROF club explained the character of the facility in one sentence: "It is hard to get above 80 kilometres per hour on the straight here".

Since then the facility has grown. The operator today gives a ribbon "up to 1950 metres long depending on the configuration", four watered skid pads, three straights 150–200 m long, an eight-metre training hill with a 30-metre climb and a 50-metre descent, a gravel track, parking for about 250 cars and 10 ha of grounds. The rule that matters more at Moto Park than the length of the straight is this: no vehicle will enter the track if its exhaust system exceeds 98 dB.

The track of discord

The conflict began before the ribbon was cut. On 11 May 2017 "Nasze Miasto" described a letter that the owners of nearby houses had sent to the Nowa Huta district council.

"The piercing noise generated by the track is beyond description and, above all, beyond endurance, and it plainly conflicts with the permits issued for single-family housing next to the track".

The residents added that the houses had stood here before the track and that nobody had informed the buyers of the plots about the planned facility. They demanded a change in the character of the place: the track was to serve driving instruction only and not, as the paper reported, extreme car racing. The Przylasek Rusiecki local zoning plan of 2003, whose northern boundary ran between Tatarakowa and Rzepakowa streets, did indeed designate land on Rzepakowa for single-family housing with existing buildings (marked from 10 M4 to 17 M4).

Jan Kościuszko replied that sound emission tests had been carried out and that everything was within the norms (about 50 dB on average), that more noise came from nearby ul. Igołomska, used by lorries, and that the residents were demanding that their plots be bought from them, which he considered absurd. He declared that tall thujas would be planted along the loudest sections of the track, although in his view there was no such need. A year later, on 1 June 2018, the centre organised an Open Day combined with Children's Day, with a sports olympiad for children run by the municipal police, as the city service reported.

The dispute did not die down, however. On 3 April 2019 Radio Kraków reported a petition demanding the closure of the centre, signed by 350 people, including the management of a nearby care and education facility. "We went to the district council, to the city hall, to the environmental inspectorate, nothing has improved", said the initiator of the petition Janusz Stanek. The residents had been promised noise barriers; instead a several-metre earth bank was built, of which Stanek said: "and what was supposedly meant to be there became part of the track". Michał Kościuszko replied that an inspection by the Environmental Protection Department had found no exceedances, that no modified cars drove on the track and that the bank served its purpose. The matter was to be settled by the Małopolska Voivodeship Office, and car training was suspended pending clarification. The statement of 26 March, with which this story begins, was precisely that suspension.

Cars did not disappear from Rzepakowa for good, they came back in another form. Already on 25 July 2020 the calendar listed SKJS, a Training Car Driving Competition: three timed runs and one familiarisation run, civilian cars only, divided into classes by engine capacity and drivetrain, a category B driving licence required, entry fee 69 zloty. In the 2023 season nine rounds were held with more than 130 participants. Today the offer also includes track driving with timing and training in one's own car, and the operator assures that "all the exercises guarantee normal, road use of the cars".

The airfield that is not here

Moto Park is sometimes associated with the former Rakowice-Czyżyny airfield. That association is false geographically: Rzepakowa lies in Branice, on the eastern edge of Nowa Huta, and the former runway in Czyżyny is a completely different part of the city. It does, however, have its source. In their letter of 2017 the residents compared the new track with the yard on ul. Stella-Sawickiego, where Michał Kościuszko's driving school operated, and that street runs across the grounds of the former airfield. Kościuszko's school therefore taught in Czyżyny, and the new centre was built on Rzepakowa; in common memory the two addresses merged into one.

Czyżyny has, moreover, its own, far older motorsport history. The airfield was founded in 1912 for the aviation of Austria-Hungary, after 1918 it was the first air base of independent Poland, and it was closed in 1963 because of the expansion of the steelworks in Nowa Huta and of housing estates. Towards the end of the airfield's operation the concrete runway was 2200 m long and 60 m wide. Flat speed tests of the Rally of Poland were run on that strip: in 1967 a 17-kilometre test marked "Kraków, lotnisko", in 1968 an analogous "Kraków, lotnisko Czyżyny", and in 1969 two tests of ten laps each, that is 34 km each. Two of those rallies, 1967 and 1969, were won by Sobiesław Zasada of Automobilklub Krakowski, first in a Porsche 912, then in a Porsche 911 S. Today part of the site is occupied by the Polish Aviation Museum, which has 25.7 ha and more than 250 aircraft.

When Kościuszko was building Moto Park, Kraków had no active facility of this kind. Since 2015 the city had been promising its own one-kilometre track in Rybitwy, a winning participatory budget project worth about 3 million zloty, but already in 2016 "Gazeta Krakowska" was writing about delays and pushing its completion back to 2018.

Ninety-eight decibels and transponders

Today the operations on Rzepakowa are run by Moto Park Kraków sp. z o.o., registered on 5 May 2023 and named in the facility's rules as its operator; alongside it there is the older company ODTJ Moto Park Kraków, on whose board Maciej, Łukasz and Mariusz Wojtas have sat since 2019. Kościuszko himself still lists running the "Moto Park Kraków Driving Technique Improvement Centre" on his website, next to catering companies and a driving technique school. The operator advertises the centre as the only ODTJ in Małopolska.

The rhythm of the week is set by motorcycles. Free motorcycle training takes place on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, as long as no other event clashes with it: a two-hour session gives 60 minutes of pure driving, at most 24 motorcyclists ride on the track in two groups swapping every quarter of an hour, times are measured by Tag Heuer transponders, and noise is checked before every session. The price: 149 zloty per session, 1190 zloty for a package of ten. Owners of supermotos and pit bikes have to fit a silencer inserted into the exhaust, a so-called db killer, for the duration of the ride. For cars the operator runs driving technique courses at levels I and II, sport courses, training in rear-wheel-drive BMW E46s (two such cars joined the fleet in January 2025) and the SKJS mentioned above.

In the spring of 2024, eleven years after breaking his spine, Michał Kościuszko announced a return behind the wheel: a start on 19 April in the Polish Off-Road Vehicle Rally Championship in Drawsko Pomorskie, in an open SSV Polaris. "It has been a long time since I looked towards the clock and measured myself against the stopwatch", he said in an interview published by RMF24. On Rzepakowa, meanwhile, the stopwatch runs regularly: on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it times motorcyclists.