Humphrey Appleby

So the sport is run for the benefit of the riders, is it? If you contract riders and you expect them to ride for 20 heats, then that's what they should be committing to. I wonder how most peoples' employers would react if you said you were leaving two hours early because you had another job to go to? Speedway seems to be unique in accepting this ridiculous state of affairs, and frankly where it's gone wrong down the years. Well the price is certainly wrong, but there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to run one heat per 5 minutes, so 15 heats equates to an hour and fifteen minutes. Not enough for a evening's entertainment. If they're a regular part of meetings, then you'd need to ensure enough junior riders turning up for every meeting, especially midweek ones. If they're unpaid then why would juniors commit to turning up to every meeting?

It's entirely a matter of promotion. If the second half is meaningless and riders don't look bothered, then of course the fans aren't going to be interested. However, if you (for example) linked second halves to something like GP qualification, or offered league bonus points for rider performances, then it might be a different story. Bottom line is that 15 heats is enough for a proper evening of entertainment unless they're artificially dragged out, and generally represents poor value for money. Something needs to be done to run a swifter programme and still keep people in the stadium for a couple of hours. Junior matches are all very well, but you're effectively having to pay the travel expenses of another 4-6 or even 8 riders, whereas with an old-style second half most of the participants will already be there.

The PZM isn't it? The BSPA might have had the chance with Cardiff, but on what terms? For example, would they or BSI get the money from the Welsh Government? You take on the risk of staging a GP as a local promoter, but see nothing of the television and sponsorship monies.

There's little point being the promoter of individual GPs. The money to be made is running the series and taking the television and sponsorship revenue.

There are very few tracks in Britain where you can just turn up and practice on a regular basis. Swedish, Danish and Australian tracks tend to be run by clubs in the middle of nowhere, and whilst I'm sure they have restrictions on when they can be used, I'm guessing it's easier for them to stage regular training sessions at minimal cost. AFAIK, Polish teams also have training sessions for their riders as well as structured development competitions for young riders. The other point of course, is that Australians and Americans have to leave their country if they want to progress beyond anything more than a local level in the sport. That's why promising riders invariably rock-up in one of the countries with a professional scene at an early age, and simply have to succeed otherwise they'll be on their way home again. Latvia seems to have a well-funded club with its own stadium, which enables it to compete in the Polish League. Daugavpils is also something of a Russian enclave in Latvia, so it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that some Russian money is floating around to support Russian 'cultural institutions'. Bilaterally-arranged team events such as test matches were I think always the responsibility of the BSPA, and responsibility for FIM events was delegated to the BSPA years ago. Lots of factors involved which include participation and growth rates, plus Olympic sports tend to get priority in the funding queue. Funding is also linked to competitive success at the highest level, which is why basketball and some other sports recently lost their funding. Speedway isn't mass participation, would probably be argued to be insufficiently health and fitness based, and could be perceived as environmentally unfriendly. That's before you get to the fact that top competitions are virtually invisible in the media, so no-one would realise if British riders were successful.

In most serious sports the international governing body makes grants to its member federations from the monies generated from the competitions under its control. The FIM is reasonably unique in selling off its premier competitions without guaranteeing at least a percentage of the profits, and probably quite unique in paying prize monies whilst another company makes the profits. What is clear is that BSI make about 1.5 million quid in profit each year, whilst the FIM banks about 1.5 million from them. From memory, about half of the FIM's cut goes on prize money for the SGP and SWC, which suggests there's another 0.75 or so million going into the FIM coffers. The FIM is complicated by the fact that motorcycle sport is multi-disciplinary, so it's probably difficult to demarcate its monies exactly. I'd imagine though that the money goes towards general administration and supporting its less prestigious competitions like the U21 and Youth events. I think the point though, is Britain along with Poland, Sweden and to some extent Denmark, are the only federations that provide full-time employment to the riders used by the SGP. So I don't think it unreasonable at all that a competition making money from the employees of others should be expected to provide some sort of compensation. It happens in other professional sports.

Short answer, no. It's been postulated ever since the start of the SGP, but hasn't happened because the money isn't there to do it, and likely never will be. The SGP doesn't pay anything close to a living wage, and why should it when the BSI can get riders to ride for them whilst paying a relative pittance compared to what they earn in Poland or wherever. If those lucrative countries were there, they'd already be staging GPs. The bottom line is there are only a few countries where speedway has a significant following, so what promoter is going to take the financial risk of staging a GP where the sport is unknown or only has a small following? Why would the likes China and Qatar and UAE want to pay money to stage a sport that's unknown in their own country, barely known globally, and with a demographic that's unlikely to pay silly money to stay in expensive resorts? How would it promote their countries or otherwise provide them with some sort of benefit? To attract blue chip sponsors you need to have a following that makes it worth their while. Speedway doesn't, which is why the SGP struggles to get any sponsors at all, and how many are actually paying real money?

They simply won't allow enough parking spaces to be built at the stadium, but far from forcing people to use alternative means of transport, it'll just discourage people from coming at all. I'd think a substantial number of Swindon fans will come from outlying areas where public transport is not viable, so it'll either mean finding nearby parking places (with the attendant risk of vandalism and council parking enforcement) or just not bothering. Blunsdon is hardly inner-city Swindon even with the recent surrounding development. There's decent road access, so why can't people drive to the stadium - although of course the longer-term goal is to either put enough obstacles in the way of the new stadium ever being built, or ensure it's not viable so there's an excuse to eventually build more houses on the site.

I think the underlying reason is the split between the BL and NL and the need to pay transfer or loan fees for British-based riders. Bringing in a foreign rider was thus cheaper, although of course Commonwealth riders were always allowed in the lower leagues as far as I know. It would be interesting, although I suspect difficult to get some analysis of the reality. However, it's probably not a huge leap for an experienced motocrosser to move into speedway, which many were encouraged to do because there was more money in speedway. Many riders would also have had grass track experience, although from memory grasstrackers didn't tend to make hugely successful speedway riders, obviously with some notable exceptions. It's something also observed by John Berry in his book. An analogy would be racing drivers moving between single seaters and touring cars. Good drivers can undoubtedly switch disciplines and give a reasonable account of themselves with minimal time in the seat because the skills are interchangeable.

Nowadays there's this thing called the Internet where it's possible to look stuff up. The promotion was previously adamant that the stadium would be completed for this season, but anyone who'd even taken a cursory look at the official details realised it was total nonsense. Gaming International's record is also one of talking complete BS over the years, and the likes of the Star should be asking the difficult questions to them, not Rosco,

You could maintain a pool of non-affiliated riders to use as guests - maybe offering them a fixed fee to cover set-up costs, or a guaranteed number of meetings during the season. Or alternatively run some sort of points handicap system to compensate for having to bring in a rider of lower ability.

Wouldn't have thought there's much more of a market than a couple of hundred engines a year. With Ferrari it's probably also a vanity thing, and they have the brand that F1 sponsors want to be associated with.

It's why competitors are invariably the worst people to run sport. A full-time SGP circus has been mooted since it started, but ain't going to happen because there's not enough money in the sport. And there's not enough money in the sport because it doesn't have wide enough appeal and sponsors and television are not interested. The top-level of the sport already effectively has to be subsidised, so it's just pure pie in the sky that it'll ever get close to MotoGP or whatever.

I prefer to have my own copy like you, but there are genuine reasons to move to a subscription model. One is that Internet-based programs need continual updating to fix security flaws that keep getting discovered, as well as support technology changes like IPv6 and encryption, and the other is that can make the initial purchase cheaper which means a consumer is more likely to try out a program in the first place. The downside is they may simply drop it as well, so it's all swings and roundabouts. In the 'good old days', you'd be paying 200 or 300 quid for office suite software, and 20-50 quid for a game. Nowadays you can buy an app for 3 or 4 pounds, and even Office 365 is only something like 60 pounds for a year's subscription. So you'll get 3-4 years use before you're out of pocket compared to the standalone version, and by then you'd usually need to think about upgrading the software anyway. Of course, there is some software that still works and is even still useful after 10+ years, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

Prospective money I'd imagine.

Coming up with a formula is not that hard. The outcome of a speedway race can be calculated according to the probability of various real-life happenings, whilst averages are a fairly accurate way of measuring rider ability. You can break down a speedway race into about five basic variables, and certainly ten or so will give quite accurate outcomes. Speedway is also blessed with having race results printed in the Speedway Star, and if you analyse (say) a season worth of these, you'll get a fairly good idea of the probabilities of things like falls, exclusions, engine failures, two minute and tapes exclusions. Obviously lesser riders are more likely to fall than better ones, whereas engine failures are relatively more random (although top riders probably also have better equipment that's less likely to fail), so the formula needs to take that into account too, but that's more a judgement call that needs to be tweaked in response to the outcome of running simulations. So the mathematical modelling is not particularly complex, and is basically within the capability of any competent programmer with a reasonable grasp of probability. I mocked something up on a ZX Spectrum back in 1988, so it'll certainly run on anything available today. More variables could be added, but then you run into the problem of how do you actually obtain qualitative data for these variables (e.g. who keeps record of punctures?) because if the inputted data is inherently garbage then it's not going to improve the simulation. Well I certainly don't have a PhD, only got an O-Level Grade C in Maths, and am not a professional programmer. Most of this has already been done. This is the bit that's missing. Again, this has already been done. If you design the program to input user-definable scripts then it would be very easy to accommodate different formats and rule changes. It doesn't need a legal expert who would likely wipe out any potential profit anyway. Things like team and rider names are held by the teams or commercial rights holders, so you need to licence them or make-up your own. In the past, teams didn't bother to enforce their rights because there was no inherent value at the time, but there's much more awareness of this now. It's not an insurmountable problem if you allow users to input their own names, but it does detract from the saleability of a game if there's a significant effort required on the part of the user to make the game realistic. Anything written for Windows, MacOS X, Android or iOS is not going to be obsolete for a long, long time. It's also very likely that it would need to be cross platform, especially if it's going to run on phones or tablets, but that's also much easier to do nowadays than in the past. I'm not sure I'd be willing to release anything as open source if I was planning to even try to recoup my development costs. Open source is all very well if the software development was funded through sponsorship or for other reasons, or if there's value in customer customisation for the developer, but why else should anyone make their intellectual property available for free?

There is some open source code available on the Internet that could be used as the basis for speedway management game. However, the market for speedway games is simply far too small for commercial developers to want to be involved, whilst I suspect prospective hobbyist programmers underestimate how much work it would be. Then of course to make any such game interesting, you need to include current teams and riders, at which point the various 'commercial rights holders' will be sticking out their hands for licence fees from what is only ever going to be a labour of love.

A good rider in his first stint, and he also had an excellent first season in the BL after moving from Wimbledon. Seemed to rely heavily on gating in my memory though, and I used to go to Reading a fair bit at the time. Of course, many people accused Nielsen of similar, but he could come from behind if he needed to (which was rarely).

Plus of course the Northern League which refused to take part in pyramid for years (despite being considered one of the top non-FL leagues for much of its history), and since reluctantly doing so, has hardly ever promoted a team. Of course, the North-East is a bit out on geographical limb (although far less so than the Western League that promotes teams) and playing local derbies all the time suits the teams, but it does show the reality of marginal competitions.

Indeed, and what about all the clamouring for less meetings so we 'can bring the top boys back'? Is reality finally hitting home?

There's nothing wrong with trying to work out an acceptable match format that addresses the problems and complaints about the current one, although there are very limited options with 6 rider teams. However, it's just tinkering like many other times in the past unless the other aspects such as value for money, riders coming-and-going and the general presentation are not addressed. Yes, it would be good to get to a situation where the leagues are approximately equal sized, or even better with more teams than now, but we're a long way from needing promotion and relegation in the sport at the moment.

So it's an excuse for another cost-cutting exercise (which probably needs to happen), but what about the likes of Poole who seem determined to win at all costs every year? I'm also not sure it's necessary to have promotion and relegation to encourage teams to move up to the 'not-so-elite' league. Just create the conditions and incentives for teams to do so.

The theory is all very fine, but you've been in the sport long enough to know the reality. There are not enough teams that want to be in the top league, so promotion and relegation is completely superfluous, not to mention detrimental to the viability of an economically marginal sport. Unless there are dramatic reductions in cost at the top level, not to mention more equalisation in terms of standard, then history is just going to repeat itself. I'd also be quite interested to know what computer program the proposed heat formula has been run through 'at least 100 times'. Not sure what it's supposed to prove anyway - it would be pretty easy to just look the heat formula and see if it's any good. Relatively more money, and until recently, more teams wanting to be in the top flight than places. Of course, the Swedish Elite League has had to be reduced in size in recent times, and the Allsvenskan is down to six teams as well. Poland has also had to revert to a two league structure, with a quite farcical arrangement where two teams don't ride away.

It didn't work before and won't work again whilst there are insufficient teams wanting to race at the top level. Promotion and relegation is only viable when more teams want to race in a league than there are available places.

I don't care for either, but they're fine in moderation. Should we also ban paracetamol because taking it too often damages your liver? Unfortunately though, people simply seem incapable of taking responsibility for their own choices and actions, or doing anything in moderation these days. Of course, it's also always someone elses' fault.