Humphrey Appleby

If you're confident of the facts, then why are you not publishing? Call their bluff...

A No. 8 can generally only replace the absent rider when R/R is being used. However, they can also be used where the absent rider may otherwise be used - namely nominated heats, and in the past, as a tactical substitute. In the heat format by the BL in the late-80s, a No. 8 could also be used to replace an injured reserve in the reserves' races (Heats 2 and 14).

Well publish and be damned!

It's also linked to the popularity of the particular sports. There's more a case for keeping a stadium if the sport being played is thriving and stadium is regularly used. The problem with football for example, is as much the slow (and in some cases fast) decline of the lower levels and clubs folding, as grounds coming under pressure of re-development.

There was also 'Super' Simon Wing, 'Marvellous' Marvyn Cox, Jens 'Rambo' Rasmussen, and of course 'The Main Dane' Hans Nielsen.

You need to stack the shale in a pyramid-type shape... I'd have thought raised cricket-style covers with pitched roofs might be worth trying though. They'd have to be shaped so they fit together on the bends, and quite possibly collapsible as well, but I can't think it's beyond science to keep rain off a track.

Well getting back to Odsal, speedway wasn't a financially successful venture last time around, so what would be different now with an even more difficult climate? Speedway needs to be investing in it's own facilities if at all possible, not putting its money into a big hole in the ground. Things like the 'National Speedway Stadium' need to be sorted out before considering another venue just down the road.

You're about two weeks behind - it was discussed on another thread. There's was a problem with the wording of the original directive, which doesn't have legal force until being incorporated into national law anyway, and the wording is being revised to make it clear motor sports is excluded. So the dramatics are unnecessary... https://motomatters.com/analysis/2016/12/23/no_the_end_is_not_nigh_for_motorsport_in.html

The Belle Vue promoters were putting money into a business that's 100% reliant on leased facilities. If those leased facilities needed to be constructed to a particular specification, I'd absolutely make it a condition of my lease to be able to inspect that the facilities met the necessary specification - at every stage of construction. I have some sympathy for the promoters who pursued a vision, eventually made it happen, but who appear to have been let down by other parties. Unfortunately though, that's the nature of doing business and the incompetence of others can cost you dearly if you neglect the supervisory process. I don't know the ins-and-outs of the arrangements with Quirky Lane, but the new stadium was built to a tight schedule and construction overruns and deficiencies are not unusual. I'm not sure why a provisional agreement couldn't have been made to use the old stadium, or to delay the start of the season if there were any delays in delivery. The bottom line is that ultimately it doesn't matter where the blame lies. Two promoters have lost their shirts as a result, the council has lost a lot of revenue, and the reputation of the new stadium has been damaged. The Council should certainly be up to supervising the construction of stands and toilets, but I doubt they have any experience at all with constructing a speedway track and I absolutely wouldn't be reliant on them signing off something that important to my business.

If the success of my business depended on a critical component such as a track, then it would be absolutely a condition of my involvement to be have the right to inspect the construction - whether myself or by a track specialist. Yes, it's clear there were failures on the part of the council, but slippages are not unusual in construction projects and it's how they're dealt with.

A test match takes place over 7 hours per day, so you'll usually get some play unless you're really unlucky. More to the point, the cricket authorities have invested a fortune in new drainage, hover covers and supersoppers that provide the best chances of getting play back on after it has rained. What has speedway done over the years to mitigate the effects of rain? This is quite aside from the fact that most people go to one test per year, whereas most speedway tracks runs every week or so.

Not sure why you need a separate Roman Catholic Church when there's a perfectly good Anglian Church... I suspect it's more an atheist country, but there's apparently over 100 churches in Sunderland so 2 mosques is hardly evidence of a new Islamic State in the north-east. Well actually a lot. The Eastern Orthodox Church is headquartered in Turkey, the Coptic Church is based in Egypt, the Syriac Church is based in Syria, plus there are 2.5 million Christians in Pakistan, 1.5 million in Iraq, and sizeable numbers in Iran as well. In fact, Saudi Arabia is probably the only Islamic country where churches aren't allowed.

Is there just the one church in Sunderland? Perhaps the existing mosque is full, or the new mosque is a different denomination, or maybe they just want to build another mosque for the hell of it? Why do you care?

All kinds of excuses can be made, but there was still a failure in the project management process - in particular inspection of the work. The track is a specialist and critical component in speedway, and there's not a chance that I'd rely on a contractor or sub-contractor to do that sort of work without checking it at every stage. This is not hindsight but sensible precautions when dealing with any sort of building work.

Well to help you out, TWK said... "It's already started - sadly there are those who can't see it though. We have a huge new Mosque opening soon here in Sunderland about half a mile from where I live. There is already another Mosque in Sunderland - I wonder where the next one will be? People need to wake up and smell the coffee before it is too late." Whatever all that's supposed to mean... BTW, the addition of this mosque in Sunderland will make a grand total of two in that city.

You can't compare speedway with darts and snooker. It's relatively simple and cheap to stage a darts or snooker tournament, they're easy sports to televise, and you can scale the prize money according to what sort of audience you get. Barry Hearn got into both sports at a time when the professionals were earning a pittance and there wasn't much in the way of governance so it was easy to take control. The competitors also largely move around on the same circuit, so he's not really competing with other leagues and can control the costs. We can argue about Barry Hearn's role in football, but I think it would be fair to say he's not had the same success in that sport. It's a completely different governance and cost model which is impossible for one individual to influence significantly. Speedway has the problem of needing specialist venues, expensive track preparation and more complicated television requirements, before you even get to the issue of environmental stuff and having to compete with other teams and leagues for riders. It's very difficult to control the product and costs, and unlike darts and snooker, the average person will never have 'played' speedway so you're always going to be up against it trying to interest a new audience. Barry Hearn seems to have been very successful and good luck to him, but I don't think the conditions are right in speedway to replicate what he's done with darts and snooker. In any case, he possibly already looked at speedway in the past and decided to steer well clear.

Sorry to hear the news. Bryn was a great servant to the sport.

It's never been great on its factual accuracy.

Only makes sense if there's sufficient land available and someone willing to fund it. Swindon can't even get their own stadium rebuilt, so what chance a national one? Coventry was the best location for a national speedway stadium, but that opportunity has been lost.

Very good. High time that someone didn't take crap organisation lying down. Also demonstrates who was responsible for running the GP - not the all ridiculous buck passing that went on.

You're quite right that you need to make it easy. I've certainly got stuff published in publications by just writing the article for the journalists (which also ensured the facts were correct!), and it's a pretty cheap east way of getting some exposure. However, readership of local newspapers has fallen through the floor in recent years, and the result has been culling of reporters. I'd be surprised if local newspapers can even spare a reporter to cover speedway and probably rely on volunteers to submit copy nowadays. Even John Gaisford I think did it more-or-less as a hobby in later years. And even assuming that local newspapers are still read by anyone, are you getting across the message to an audience that's going to constitute the future of your business? And they're right to be untrusting. The modern media method seems to be to always try to find some sort of controversial angle, and if the facts don't fit, then either omit them or make something up. I very occasionally have journalists calling me to do stories on this or that, and whilst it's usually about reasonably complex technicalities, most seem completely incapable of relating any resemblance of what they've been told. And you also have to always insist on approving the copy before it's published, otherwise all sorts of controversial rubbish will be attributed to you. That's basically why journalists get mundane and meaningless answers.

The trouble started when museums were encouraged to become more populist, which was partly driven by them being forced to open for free. Whilst the underlying intention was good, the reality is that museums just seem to have become extensions of shopping malls, with the exhibits often secondary to the 'experience'. And somehow intellectualism is frowned about these days, with the assumption that things have to be dumbed down if they're to be popular. How on earth you can't interest kids in things like rockets and trains by themselves is beyond me, and all the other paraphernalia catering for them is just a distraction. Going to a museum should also be considered a social development experience, not just about learning but learning how to learn and how to behave in a public space even if it might be boring. Of course one of the problems I find with museums is that I can actually learn more about what's in them on the Internet, and I don't have to fight my way through gift stores and coffee shops to do it. But who is still reading local newspapers these days? I'd hasten to guess the demographic is older people who're being alerted to the fact they can watch a DVD about how better things were in the past. It's a complete turn-off to anyone under 40, even if they actually own a DVD player anymore. I'm not knocking what you do at Backtrack because I think you do a great job and I like speedway nostalgia, but a teenager reading about riders from 70s would have as much relevance to their lives as Glenn Miller and Sprouts Elder did to mine.

How do you know I'm not likely to go again? As I said, I stopped going regularly for a variety of reasons, now don't live in the UK, and don't have a convenient local track to attend even if I did. The people who still go regularly may grumble about things, but they're still going so can't be that disenchanted. Obviously their opinions shouldn't be disregarded, but it's the people who don't go you really need to be asking. The first problem with speedway is that most of the population have barely heard of it, so it's a bit difficult to ask people who have no interest in the first place what they'd like. So you've then got to target the people who're well aware of what speedway is, who may have previously gone regularly, but have fallen away from the sport for whatever reason. In my case, the nail in the coffin was the closing of the local track, but I had become increasingly disenchanted with the sport for 2 or 3 years leading up to it. Meetings being called off at the drop of a hat, meetings taking an age to run with endless indeterminable delays, and what just seemed to be a general contempt for the paying public. I'd still go to the occasional meeting elsewhere when I was nearby though, and the fact that I'm still on a speedway forum suggests I haven't completely lost interest. However, with not going very often any more, it gives one a different perspective, and sorry to say that the sport just comes over as being from a different era nowadays. Not sure what the 'one third of British tracks' relates to. I've been to just about every British track, although some admittedly not for a number of years. Most were rundown dumps then, and I'd be amazed if they've improved any in the intervening years given the general state of the sport. One exception was the new Belle Vue which I went and looked at earlier this year when I had an hour to spare in Manchester, and my recollection was that Mildenhall was a pleasant but remote experience when I went a couple of years ago. I didn't comment at all on the quality of the racing at all, and I already clarified my comments on presentation were about the suggestions to bring back the old ways as the solution to improving crowds. However, it's quite apparent from reading comments on here, that little has been done to address the delays that were becoming increasingly prevalent even when I was going regularly. It may not be the case everywhere, but to me the public needs to know what a speedway meeting entails wherever they go, not just what the local track may decide. In how many sports do you need to fill in the programme in order to follow the proceedings? Does anyone do manual lap scoring in F1 these days? I imagine young people are stimulated in the same way as they always were - by introducing them to different experiences and then leaving them to their, erm... own devices. What's difficult for people to understand who didn't grow up with the Internet (which includes me), is that there's so much information easily available out there now that's it's difficult to absorb, far less work out what's interesting. We were limited by the knowledge we could obtain in the local library and what we could make out of Meccano, and had to occupy ourselves kicking balls around the park, reading the limited selection of books available or designing Hornby train layouts (in the days before there were computer programs to help you). The options were much more limited. Having said this, I think the trend towards 'interactive' museums is more driven by adults who think it's what the 'yoof' wants rather than what it needs. I certainly think the average museum of the past could have provided a bit more explanatory material around their exhibits, but I'd have felt utterly patronised as an 8-year to have to press buttons to supposedly learn stuff.

One of the things I found surprising in Australia was the absurd health and safety. We were instructed (by an external H&S advisor) to tell our staff not to cross roads on red pedestrian lights as the organisation was legally responsible for their safety during working hours (which included travelling to/from work and lunch hour) I asked whether any employer had ever been successfully sued because an employee was run over as a result of them crossing a public road on their way to lunch, and of course no-one could point to an example. I refused to rely the instruction on the grounds that the message simply wouldn't be taken seriously by the staff, and that it would undermine important healthy and safety initiatives. It just needs people to be more questioning of the more idiotic aspects.

The 'press' is dying a death itself. I haven't actually bought a newspaper in years and it's obviously the case for many others as well, so the press just doesn't have the staff or interest in devoting space to low-profile sports. Speedway needs to self-promote through the Internet, finding ways to grab attention.