Humphrey Appleby

I heard that it's the FIM that actually pays the prize money, although no doubt the BSI lurker on here will correct me if I'm wrong..

Isn't the Latvian GP one of the locally promoted GPs, where the financial risk is assumed by the club?

Snyper will be pleased. I must I enjoyed the Bob Radford article about the Norwegian riders in the last edition.

The Swedish alphabet has 29 characters (æ, ä, å), and that's one of extra ones pronounced 'aw'. You can substitute 'aa' for 'å' though. Danish and Norwegian also have similar extra characters (æ, ø, å), although the 'ø' can also be written as 'oe'.

It's a group of islands between Finland and Sweden which speak Swedish but through a quirk of history are part of Finland. However, thanks to an international treaty, they're completely autonomous from Finland and don't have to pay taxes. As a result, every ferry travelling from Sweden to Finland and vice-versa inexplicably stops there in the middle of the night so they can sell duty-free alcohol even though they're travelling between EU countries. It's basically the Finnish version of Guernsey or Jersey. I actually stopped in Aland for a couple of days last year. I actually know one of the people who decides who gets on the definitive country list, and if you ply him with enough alcohol you never know.

Yes, why doesn't Åland have its own speedway team? Technically, it has more international recognition than Scotland as it's on the UN lists.

The 'Team GB' thing is relatively recent in terms of what the team is called for home consumption. However, in all the official communications I've seen from the FIM over the years, it's 'ACU' or 'Great Britain'. I'll have to dig out some old foreign programmes to see what the name of national team was called in Eighties and Nineties outside of Britain, but from memory it's a bit of a mix. However, using the local equivalent of 'England' wouldn't necessarily prove anything anyway, as the term is often used (incorrectly) by foreigners to apply to the whole of the UK.

I'm afraid that if you're not a citizen of UN member state, Taiwan, Palestine, or an officer of the Holy See or an international treaty organisation, then you don't exist in the eyes of the rest of the world. You basically need to be on the ISO 3166-1 list, and Scotland isn't nor likely to be as an internal entity of a state already on this list.

In the meantime, I shall be supporting 'Team GB' until their inevitable exit from the SWC.

All I'll say is the best of British luck to you , as they'll no doubt tell you (if they answer you at all) that you need to get the FIM Statutes changed as these stipulate one national representative team per federation. Whilst the ACU represents the whole of Great Britain, then there's no chance of a Scottish team, so you'd better start lobbying the Scottish ACU to gain FIM affiliation. As has been pointed out numerous times before, when 'England' and 'Scotland' raced in the WTC, then did so with Australia and New Zealand (who were also represented by the ACU at the time) to determine the ACU representative. Later on when Australia and New Zealand formed their own federations, and Scotland was dropped anyway, the ACU representative team may well have colloquially been named as 'England', but it still represented Great Britain and appears as such in the FIM records. With respect to the World Pairs, on many occasions different countries entered two or more pairs of riders, so no doubt the English and Scottish pairs were officially GB 1 and GB 2.

What vote? I have no interest in the SGP, so I couldn't care less whether the British GP is held at Cardiff or Wembley. The point though, is that a speedway GP has never been held at Wembley and unlikely ever will be, so no-one can say whether it's better there or not. Personally, I'd have said the Millenium Stadium is better suited to speedway (especially at its current level), but why all the prejudice against Wembley when no-one has ever actually watched speedway there?

Cough.. Gelsenkirchen..

Services are generally ghastly places that one never wants to linger for long. It's become even worse since some of them have been turned into shopping centres, and people actively seem to flock to them merely for the shopping 'experience'.

No, because Team GB doesn't cover Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of the all-Ireland MCUI, and indeed the MCUI is based in Northern Ireland

He might be a nice chap and have a lovely family, but in what way is he a hero? A hero for scoring an average of 2 points per GP?

The SGP has always been a bit of a Potemkin Village, and apart from a brief period, has not really done as well as popularly imagined. The reality is that it has never greatly improved on pre-SGP attendances except for a couple of 'prestige' rounds, and whilst one shouldn't knock that, one needs to get its supposed 'success' into perspective. I'm not sure that going back to the old World Final format is really the answer, but I do think the whole competition needs to be scaled back to 6-8 rounds, with rounds mostly held in the four major speedway countries. The whole qualification process needs revamping as well, to increase variety and interest in the series.

Ah, so he's resurfaced has he? What's he up to these days?

Well then don't ask questions that you already know the answer to. In practically any sport you can think of, only a handful of competitors are likely to win, and it's been pretty much that way in speedway whether the old World Final or the SGP format has been used. There were a handful of unexpected World Final winners in what 50 years, and there's even less chance of it with the GP format now. I think there's virtually no chance of finding 16 riders capable of winning a single GP, far less the whole series, but that's what you need to make up the numbers. Presumably though, the newcomers may eventually gain experience to become top runners, and that's the point. Less slick tracks might help some riders and would certainly make the racing better to watch, but the global superstar would likely still not win anything...

16 riders are needed to make the heat formula work, and to generate the optimal number of heats without repetition.

Of course I don't know the real reason why Ole Olsen prepares crap tracks, but I have spoken with two GP riders in the past who both suggested the hard, slick theory. In reality, does anyone other than Ole Olsen really know the answer though? With respect to the economic arguments, I'm not going to make bold claims about things that can't be verified somewhere. However, significant losses were reported in the last available accounts, and when companies subsequently disappear from the companies register and are reconstituted with a different name, that often tells a story.

I'd be surprised if an apparently successful organisation such as IMG, is prepared to tolerate an apparently loss-making competition for long.

My guess is that current track preparation is down to Ole Olsen's beliefs in how tracks should be prepared, possibly combined with a lack of cash for preparing them. The SGP finances do not appear to be especially healthy, but I'm not sure how that should adversely affect permanent tracks such as Leszno. The real question is why IMG allow things to continue like this, but one wonders whether they're really interested in the SGP.

That seems like a bit of cop-out to me. The FIM is indeed responsible for inspecting and approving tracks for conformance with the regulations, but the regulations are notoriously silent on standard of track preparation. Track preparation itself appears to fall within the remit of the Race Director, and so the question is whether that's a FIM or BSI appointment. I honestly find it hard to believe the FIM would impose a Race Director against the wishes of an organisation paying for the competition rights, or indeed that the rights holders (BSI, or is it BSL now?) have no influence over how tracks are prepared. After all, track preparation is key to the presentation of their product. Furthermore, I surely recall a big announcement after the Gothenburg fiasco about how BSI would assume responsibility for track preparation from the local organisers.

I'm afraid I don't think BSI are that professional. They only look good because the rest of speedway is such a shambles, but the Gelsenkirchen fiasco last year, and Gothenburg a few years ago, demonstrated that the organisation leaves something to be desired.

Indeed, but the ability to watch the sport at different levels is what originally interested me. At one level, it is inherently simple, but without the team racing element, tactical subs (as they were), rider replacement and reserve rides, the sport would quickly become one dimensional. That's why individual racing has never much appealed to me. There's no complexity, and if you have too much of it, it just becomes boring. I think that's why the appeal of the SGP is now wearing off - there's really isn't much too it, and once the link between teams and riders is diminished (as a number of riders no longer have British teams), that reduces the interest even further.