Humphrey Appleby

Love the speedway? I think more like desperate to keep any sort of event to stem the losses on the stadium, especially since the football has moved away. The list of events at the Millennium looks very sparse this year.

Can't see that it'll make a lot of odds to the track. More likely that the expensive pitch will get damaged.

If Shane Warne can pull Liz Hurley, then there's hope for any sportsman...

Maybe there's been mutual agreement that the GP is too crap to bother with any more. Crowd was poor as well.

Haven't the McCanns found any new evidence to discuss...?

That's more like the bowler walking back to their mark whilst the ball is dead, or a batsman coming out to bat from the pavilion. There is a time constraint on both (2 minutes), but it's officially not action because the ball is not in play at that point, and neither has a race started whilst the riders come to the tapes.

And the Laws of Football clearly define when the ball is dead (i.e. not in play). Unlike some sports though, the clock usually continues to run when the ball is out of play. AFAIK, a non-striking batsman can't be run out once the bowler has entered their delivery stride, so the run out can only be effected during the run-up. Of course, it normally only happens at the end of the run-up for obvious reasons, but in theory a batsman could be thrown out. That's it's an extremely rare occurrence is irrelevant as it _can_ happen.

I'm not getting into a pointless discussion over this. The simple fact of the matter is under the laws of cricket, is ball is in play when the bowler starts their run up. Similarly, a speedway race 'starts' when the green light comes on - the act of getting to the tapes is not part of the race. We can argue the toss over how many seconds on average ball is in play, but including a bowler's run up until it goes dead again, I don't think 10 seconds is unreasonable in T20 cricket where it gets hit around more than in other formats. And even taking the are minimum of 5 overs per side (and it would usually be more in rained off match), that still equates to 10 heats of speedway.

If it performs that well 'out-of-the-box', then it'll no doubt perform even better after it's been tuned. And once one rider turns up with a tuned GTR, everyone else will have to do the same. I wonder how many riders would equate slightly lesser performance (and losing points money) over improved reliability (and thus saving money)?

That's primarily because there's supposed to be some stupid code of conduct about not Mankading a batsman at the bowler's end. I've never understood it myself, as if you're out of your ground then you're out of ground. No-one suggests that a batsman who's stumped shouldn't be given out, so why is it any different for running out a batsman at the other end? Regardless though, it's still in the laws of the game and it certainly happened last year when Joss Buttler was run out during an ODI.

Not really. The ball is live in cricket the moment a bowler starts his run-up, whereas a speedway race is not live the moment a rider comes out on track. A race is only live from the moment the green light comes on - the two-minute warning is more equivalent to a new batsman having to come out from the pavilion and take guard at the crease within a certain time (I think 3 minutes).

Depends how you define action. I'd say the bowler's run-up to the crease should be considered action as the ball is live at that point, and a batsman can be run out. Regardless though, a 5-over T20 match would be the absolute minimum number of overs bowled. Most rained off matches would have substantially more overs bowled.

In cricket, the players are at least out on the pitch doing something - whether shining the ball or throwing it back to the bowler. In speedway, nothing happens between races, except perhaps a tractor going round and around. I'd say though, an average of 20 seconds of action per ball in cricket x 60 deliveries, and it's more than a full length speedway match.

The whole affair makes the sport a farce.

Where will the money come from to pay for these riders? Stadium availability is also different in Poland and Sweden.

Mr. Russell didn't want to buy a used car from himself...

Presumably the Clerk-of-the-Course has substantial input into whether conditions are fit to continue. They're responsible for the state of the circuit.

In Twenty20 you can have a result with 5 overs per side, so 25% of the match completed. However, that still represents 40 or so minutes of action, which is four times as much as calling a speedway match after 10 heats.

That's of course one way of doing things, although you'd be a bit annoyed if you'd happened to naturally find a good engine off-the-shelf. As someone else has already mentioned, you could evaluate engines against a standard fiche, but that would be quite a time consuming process Yes, but people would if there were races to make tea... The reasons people tinker with race engines is because they want to go faster than their opponents, and so will aim to squeeze every tolerance. If they don't, their opponents will, and presumably they feel the trade-off in higher costs is worthwhile. Limiting the number of engines isn't really going to help, unless you limit the number of internal components you can use as well. And that would require stamping serial numbers on every piece, and then pulling the engine apart periodically to check different parts hadn't been substituted. Even then, it's easy enough for a competent engineer to manufacture a part with an identical serial number. I agree 'something should be done', but it's actually a difficult problem to solve.

A speedway version of Duckworth-Lewis is what's needed...

Clearly, but if they profess to be an professional promotional organisation, is it too much to ask for someone to draft a version in one of the official languages of the FIM (and presumably FIM Europe too)? I find it hard to believe they can't find anyone in Poland who can string a few coherent English sentences together.

You won't find many engine builders willing to give much of a guarantee on a high revving racing engine. There's too many things that can break, accidents that can happen, not to mention user error. Regardless of what you do, riders would soon establish a relationship with a favoured service agent who'd built them a perfectly legal selected parts engine. No matter how well engineered or what the quality control on a particular engine type is, there will always be variations between one and another. The top riders will simply buy umpteen engines to find the ones with the best parts. Equally, you'll get always get the odd engine that simply doesn't run as well as others. What do riders do if they have the misfortune to get stuck with one of those? Regular cars are not usually run to their maximum tolerances, and certainly not most of the time. If you revved the average car engine constantly between 10 and 15,000 revs without changing gear, I doubt your dealer would entertain the warranty when you brought it in for a service.

Who is this minority getting rich from speedway then?

Except finding someone who can write press releases half decently (which is even something BSI manage).

That does little to prevent tuning. Even the most reliable engines have to be serviced, so you just get the service agents to rebuild the engine with legitimate selected parts. So you end-up having to buy ten engines to find the best parts from each to make a good one.