Humphrey Appleby

Does one count temporary tracks in stadiums, indoor speedway tracks, or multi-purpose 'speedway' tracks such as you get in Australia and New Zealand? Do you count Hackney twice if you visited it as the 'London Stadium'? Anyway, my count would be 53 'pure' speedway tracks in Britain (only counting Hackney once), Poland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovenia and the USA. Sadly 17 of these are now defunct. To this you can add 3 stadium tracks (Cardiff, Munich and Gothenburg), 2 indoor speedway tracks (London Arena and Manchester G-MEX), 2 ice racing tracks (Assen and Utrecht). I suppose you could also include Telford as well, but that's neither ice racing nor speedway. There's also a handful of longtracks and grasstracks as well, but in the case of grasstracks I'd only count them if they were in a proper stadium. I've been to plenty of grasstrack meetings held in various fields, but I'm not sure you can describe them as tracks as such.

Speaking from our own experience, there's usually some relationship between event organisers and the government at some level in Russia. If you can arrange some some sort of 'fixer', then nothing is a problem and it's amazing how easy the paperwork is expediated. If someone doesn't want you there though, it's amazing what obstacles crop up. In my view, international sporting events should not be held where there is a general visa requirement. The only European countries that really do this now are Russia and Belarus, but if you do allocate an event there (or anywhere for that matter), it should be a condition of hosting that visas are automatically granted to qualified competitors.

How convenient! The games you play with the Russian authorities over visas are something of legend.

Kelvin Tatum was never a rider I particularly admired during his riding days, but I did think the interview was very good. In fact, I thought it was one of the best issues for a while. It was rather sad to read that he felt that he was driven out of Coventry by the fans in the end, but he wasn't the first. I remember once being asked to sign a petition to have Kai Niemi sacked as I was going into the stadium.

Attracting 12,000 fans (let along 7,000) for the sport's premier event is considered good health...? Ullevi used to draw 25-30,000.

But I thought we were reassured last year, that IMG were taking the SGP forward to a new level? And any suggestions that the sponsors don't exactly look blue chip were roundly refuted.., although it was difficult to tell whether there were any sponsors at all in Gothenburg such was the dirt covering their banners.

Craig Williamson - there's a blast from the early days of speedway on the Internet.

The problem with a pre-season GP is that riders will have had less preparation and practice time, so I'm not sure they'd be greatly enamoured by the prospect. The truth of the matter though, is there's no ideal time for an Antipodean GP. A pre-season GP at the end of February or early March would leave too long a gap before the start of the European rounds, an October GP clashes with the end of the European (or at least British) season, and a November GP not only has the same problem of a long gap between rounds, but starts competing with the pre-Christmas dollar.

Malilla is admittedly a bit remote, but it's still not 6 hours drive from everywhere!

You couldn't seriously hold a GP in Mount Gambier, even if it has the facilities. With the greatest of respect, it's in the middle of nowhere. A GP needs to be held somewhere relatively close to a major conurbation, that people can fly to.

The reality though, is that the world has changed, and speedway attendances have fallen in nearly every country since then. There are not even ten countries even close to being 'major' nowadays, far less able to support a GP. But where do the proceeds go now? Not back into speedway it would seem.

Isn't the north-west of Germany a reasonable hotbed of grasstrack/longtrack? Whilst I haven't looked for a while, there certainly used to be several speedway tracks in that region as well.

Amsterdam wouldn't get the crowds to justify the expense in holding it in the indoor Amsterdam Arena. The revamped (and smaller) Amsterdam Olympic Stadium might be an option, but it would no doubt require some local promoter willing to assume the risk. Budapest is probably also limited by the fact speedway isn't a big sport there, and public authorities don't currently have the money to throw around on sponsorship.

Seemed to be a fair degree of coverage of speedway (in its various forms) when I went to NZ a couple of years ago, and it was more visible than in many of the major speedway countries. Wasn't Wellington mentioned a few years ago, when a NZ GP was briefly announced and then deleted from the SGP calendar?

Because the Cardiff GP is the showcase event, that's probably used by BSI/IMG to sell the SGP as a whole. If you added another British GP, it may dilute the effect of Cardiff in terms of crowd and prestige. Of course, the other explanation may well be that no-one else is prepared to come forward and pay BSI the necessary fees to stage a second British GP, whereas in Poland (and Sweden) they are.

Even despite the reported dire racing (I didn't watch a single round last season), it would be utterly tedious to watch the same 16 riders week-after-week. The only thing that makes individual racing interesting anyway, is following riders from your own team, so break that link and it'll be an absolute bore.

I'd guess mostly from television and sponsorship revenue, and maybe the factory teams running a loss leader. However, the difference with speedway is that road racing probably has wider geographical appeal than speedway (which is really only popular in a handful of countries), plus the bikes are much closely related to what the public are able to buy. Therefore television and marketing rights can probably be sold for more in a wider number of countries, and sponsors can get wider and more relevant coverage than with speedway, so are prepared to pay more. Look at the SBK sponsors and most of the sponsors are established and recognisable names, and the MotoGP even more so. Compare that with the Speedway GP, and you see the difference.

The obvious question still, is who would pay for it all? The current GP series largely has to be held in smallish stadiums in a handful of countries for cost reasons, so where would the cash come from to finance a global circus, let alone the question of who'd actually come to watch outside of the main speedway countries?

Scotland wasn't in any position to do what Australia and NZ did. Whilst they originally fell under the ACU for historical reasons, they were independent nations and therefore fully entitled to separate recognition by the FIM. Scotland is not an independent nation, and no matter how much the nationalists may jump up and down, unless they gain independence or the policy of the FIM changes, then they're not entitled to separate representation. The problem is though, if everyone started doing this, international competition would be quickly reduced to inter-regional competition. The UK home nations have separate representation in the sports that were first organised in the UK, and therefore were the only form of representative competition in the early days. For historical reasons they've been grandfathered into modern day competitions, but it makes no sense to introduce representative teams of constituent nations in sports that have no history of this.

The obvious reason is that the FIM recognises one federation per country, and the UK (actually Great Britain in the case of motorcycling) is the internationally recognised entity. It's important for international reasons that only recognised federations issue licences, otherwise you get into no end of confusion as to who's allowed to issue what. Secondly, it's probably a matter of logistics and cost. Somebody needs to process the applications, and the ACU already has staff paid to do that. The SACU doesn't strike me as being well resourced as it is, and it probably isn't worth their while employing someone for the relative handful of licences it would process. At the end of the day, a licence is a licence, and it really doesn't matter who does the issuing.

Test matches and the like are bi-lateral arrangements between promoters, so can feature anything and anyone. The rules for FIM events are quite clearly defined, and only FMNs from UN or IOC recognised countries can enter representative teams. Where there have been composite sides in FIM events in the past, I suspect they're essentially riding as track reserves to make up the numbers. No discrimination at all. The FIM rules are one national team per FMN, which internationally is the ACU for Scotland.

In the past, many British tracks didn't conform to the maximum and minimum dimensions for FIM track, but those have been relaxed in recent years. Any British track that's staged an FIM meeting in the past 3 years should be FIM licensed, so I'd guess Poole, Peterborough, Coventry, King's Lynn and Rye House.

How many British tracks are actually FIM licensed?

Rob, you also went to the World Final ub Katowice, right? What would you have said the attendance was there?

Was the attendance at the 1989 World Final in Munich not bigger? I don't know if real figures were ever published, but the 80,000 capacity stadium looked more than half-full to me. I wasn't at Chorzow/Katowice in 1986, but I'd have thought that must have run it pretty close as well. It must be said though, few of the other venues used after 1982 could actually hold 37,000 - Norden, Vojens (twice), Bradford (twice), Wroclaw, Pocking etc.. Probably only Gothenburg and Chorzow.