Humphrey Appleby

Be fair, Ontario is involved as well...

Published rates are as follows, from which travel and hotel expenses must be paid: 1st US$ 11,000 2nd US$ 8,200 3rd US$ 6,900 4th US$ 6,000. 5th US$ 5,250 6th US$ 5,100 7th US$ 4,650 8th US$ 4,500 9th US$ 3,850 10th US$ 3,700 11th US$ 3,650 12th US$ 3,600 13th US$ 3,550 14th US$ 3,500 15th US$ 3,450 16th US$ 3,400 17th US$ 2,100 18th US$ 2,100 To put in perspective, the leading rider Jason Crump has earned a total of US$ 62,300 this season (an average of US$ 8,900 per GP), whilst Scott Nicholls (the lowest placed regular rider) has earned just US$ 24,250 (an average of US$ 3,464 per GP). There is/was the Super Prix cash as well, but that's apparently been scaled back this season.

What's happened with Russia, which was widely suggested for 2010?

There aren't 59 countries in Europe, by any definition... and even if they were, that's only half of 117... And what's the potential speedway viewing audience in the Vatican, Monaco and Liechtenstein?

I find that very hard to believe. I've never seen the SGP shown or even advertised outside of a handful of countries, let alone over half the countries in the world. Perhaps the SGP highlights can in theory be accessed (via satellite) in that many countries, but I doubt there's any sort of audience. Having extra rounds outside the European season sounds fine in theory, but I'm not sure the riders would really fancy racing an extended season, especially if they were twiddling their thumbs in-between rounds. If they're were on F1 wages perhaps, but not for a few dollars more. In addition, there would probably have to be a long gap between the last European round, and the first Asia-Pacific round as the seasons aren't really contiguous. This is all quite aside from the fact there are already too many rounds, and adding another four would be a complete snoozefest. I'd could certainly see some milege in replacing existing rounds with GPs on other continents, but again, how will it all be paid for?

It's one thing to wish for expanded series, quite another to find viable venues. No doubt expansion to Russia, Australia, New Zealand and Asia will be postulated again, but who's going to pay for it, and when will league racing be fitted in?

I think Backtrack has been a great publication, and I must admit I've quite enjoyed the past couple of issues. However, it's perhaps starting to take on a bit of fanzine feel, with slightly ad-hoc articles that don't obviously fit into the overall theme of a particular issue. It's not really a criticism as such, as I appreciate it must be difficult to constantly find interesting material, let alone find willing contributors, but one does wonder whether the best stuff has now mostly been covered... I would say that I think Malcolm Simmons could be a good addition, as I thought his autobiography was surprisingly good and was up there with the Berry tomes. Usually the books of sportspeople are deathly dull, but his was a rare and enjoyable exception.

I think the main problem would be fitting the fixtures into the existing overcrowded international schedule. I'm also not sure what format would be used, but a test match format would really only work for the five or six countries that would be competitive, and you'd still need to find at least 10 dates if everyone rides each other home and away. Having a 4TT would allow for smaller teams and potentially allow more nations to be competitive, but a 4TT isn't easy to work in a league format unless you have 7, 8 or 16 teams. Furthermore, each team only gets one home meeting every four meetings, so there's the potential cashflow to consider. Some sort of home-and-away test series over a couple of seasons might work though.

I'm afraid Twenty20 cricket would for me win out over speedway every time these days. Even though cricket is often tarnished with reactionism, you have to say that someone somewhere recognised the existing product was unattractive, and developed an appealing form of the sport that would keep it in business. I suspect the golden goose will eventually be killed through over saturation, but I'm sure speedway wouldn't mind having 93 million quid to spend on keeping marginal tracks in business. If the SGP is considered the pinnacle of the sport, then I truly fear for the future of speedway.

If I were actually interested in the SGP, I'd prefer to see a competitive process for deciding the lineup. Yes, you might get a Zorro or Tomicek in there, but that would be better than this nonsense of trying to second guess who 'might be good for the GP', and then just nominating Nicholls once again anyway. Furthermore, if the GP Challenge actually meant anything, some of the better riders might start putting more effort into it, and you wouldn't have the potential scenario of a Tomicek coming within a whisker of qualifying. In any case, such riders might even end up being a refreshing surprise, because at the moment the whole thing is duller than dishwater.

Too much of even the best product in the world becomes repetitive, and I think the trick is to find the right balance. Seeing the same 16 riders meeting-after-meeting (and even worse, year-after-year) lacks variety, even if the racing was up to much (although I can't really comment on that as I haven't watched a single GP this year). 6-8 rounds would be more than enough to make the World Championship a fair reflection of ability, but reduce the problems of one rider dominating proceedings for too long. However, no doubt BSI need to run a certain number of rounds to amortise their costs. Yes, but who will pay for it all? Despite the assertions that IMG are making a big investment in the SGP, it obviously isn't financially viable to run in certain venues, particularly outside Europe. The problem though, is what if one of the top riders gets injured early on in a GP and finishes in the bottom two? In fact, this happened in one of the early series when Tommy Knudsen got injured in the first GP, and ended-up at reserve for the next one, thus scuppering his chances before they'd even begun. Now it might be argued it was his own fault for having a silly solid disc in his front wheel which caused him to crash when it got sprayed with shale (wouldn't be a problem these days though ), but would you want to exclude someone like Nicki Pedersen for the rest of the reason for something that wasn't his fault?

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