Humphrey Appleby

BSI are incorporated in England and Wales so it's very easy to pursue a small claims case against them. It will cost a couple of hundred quid and the small print may allow them to wriggle out of responsibility on the grounds they weren't the actual organiser. However, they'll have to contest each claim and appoint legal representation to do do, so if enough do it then it'll piss them off at the very least.

Fans should consider small claims, even if it's just to make a nuisance for BSI. High time they were held to account rather than be allowed to blame the local organisers and cat's mother as usual...

Why not actually just hold it in Vojens and be done with it? Horsens is hardly the first destination on most tourist lists, and most would be hard pushed to even locate it on a map.

Knudsen at his peak was a better rider than the likes of King and Doncaster, but World Final history is full of riders who finished third and not better for whatever reason. There was the odd fluke winner of the World Final, but really only the very best ever won.

I seem to remember Knudsen broke his back after the end of the 1988 season, so I'm referring more to his prime years as 10 point heat leader. Whilst from memory he was a very consistent league rider in the 85-88 period, I still wouldn't rate him in the echelon of "could've won the world championship" anymore than Lance King, Les Collins or Jeremy Doncaster who also finished on the podium in World Finals.

Knudsen was another that never seemed to be able to pull off the big rides when necessary. A good league rider, but I'd never put him up there with Nielsen and Gundersen.

Tatum was always too inconsistent to string together five good rides in a row, especially at the highest level. Never mattered what the track was like. He maybe started to get it together when he focused on longtrack, but not at his speedway career peak. BTW - Tatum did exactly the same thing to Nielsen in the previous years' Intercontinental Final, so it's all fair in love and war.

Per Jonsson in 1990 - who actually won it. I'd argue that Rickardsson was never the best rider any year he won it, if you're talking about all-round performance, but along with Gundersen had the knack of pulling it out of the bag in world championship events.

Are people supposed to be sympathetic? BSI have once again demonstrated a substantial lack of supervision over the organisation of a GP, especially given the optimistic timescales for revamping a derelict venue. Despite the weather being a convenient excuse, it's now quite apparent where the blame lies for yet another fiasco. To pass the buck is such a manner is astonishing, and to compound it by suggesting that travelling fans should have gone with a favoured tour agent, even more so. There should be a reasonable expectation that an event takes place in the time and place as advertised, and whilst every speedway fan appreciates that the weather can intervene, it's quite apparent the track was I adequately prepared. Or on another occasion you might be left at a train station in the middle of nowhere.

So zero is zero, even when we know it's not really zero - which surely brings us back to the original point?

And what makes you such an expert? A zero reading in testing equipment can also mean below a reliably detectable threshold, not that it's actually 0%. Ward knew the rules, broke the rules and was caught, but there's substantial degrees between being fractionally over a very low limit and being steaming. That we don't know as yet.

A lot depends on how much 'over the limit' he was. It's virtually impossible for anyone to have 0% alcohol in their bloodstream, so if it was below the level for driving, then one might have a degree of sympathy, especially the morning after the night before when any moderate impairment is going to be less after some sleep. I've had a few beers the night before a motor sport event, and whilst I'm careful to moderate it, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that my blood alcohol level wouldn't have been zero even though I'd still be well under the legal limit for driving. This said, it takes more than a couple of beers to be over any sort of limit umpteen hours later, and even if he wasn't physically impaired, I can't imagine it's the best possible preparation for a world championship event.

BSI run the series, and the local promoters are essentially sub-contractors who they choose to host the GPs. BSI should responsible for ensuring the local promoters meet the necessary standards for hosting GPs, and following-up with inspections as necessary to ensure those standards are being met. Whilst the local promoters may have been a bit unlucky with the weather, this was an untried and untested stadium (not to mention one that was originally dilapidated), so there should been far more stringent checks than for a well established and regular speedway venue. That this apparently hasn't occurred is careless at the very least, and once again we have another fiasco with fans being left out of pocket. I think the most dreadful thing about this though, is how BSI abrogate responsibility when things go wrong. If it was genuinely down to the weather rather than a poor track, with Daugavpils being the back-up, then provision should have been made for some sort of transport for the people who did have tickets, but once again the travelling fans are way down the consideration.

If only the shale had been stored in a scientific way...

That circuit is going to be a huge white elephant, even assuming it ever gets built. There's already a preponderance of race circuits in Wales and the UK as a whole, and what's going to sustain the circuit other than the one MotoGP per year?

The last F1 GP hasn't been in Australia for years now. It's been Brazil or Abu Dhabi for the last few years, which are hardly that inconvenient for watching in Europe.

It would be quite easy to program these factors into an otherwise random number generator. The difficulty is how you'd assess these things in a realistic way (and on an ongoing basis), and working out how much of a factor they are in the outcome of a race. Indeed, these things are very likely to be different from rider-to-rider and track-to-track, but you ultimately have to compromise between complexity and playability, otherwise only the extreme diehards will bother with your game.

Well there's an inherent degree of randomness in a real speedway meeting, otherwise the result would be totally predictable. The point is to take the factors that make one rider better than another, but then base your randomness generation on those factors. That way, the odds are that the better rider will win, but it's not a foregone conclusion any more than in a real meeting.

It's very easy to do. If you generate several random numbers within the range of a rider's average (e.g. 0-6 or 0-12), then whilst the higher averaged rider will likely score more highly, the degree of randomness means the lower average rider can still win. If you factor in a percentage for engine failures (which is roughly similar for all riders, although top riders will probably be slightly less susceptible due to having better equipment) and falls (more likely for lower averaged riders, but still possible for better riders), then that adds to the degree of 'randomness'. Track specialism wouldn't need any special factoring other than working out different averages for each track, and factors could easily be added for gating and passing, although you'd need to do some reasonably complex analysis of individual riders performance in order to grade them. The problem is that in order to get a professional quality speedway game developed, you'd probably have to invest 6-12 months full-time effort before you get any return. That investment in time would have to be amortised over the potential lifetime of the game, which in the entertainment business is probably only a couple of years before people lose interest. So even on the off-chance you were able to make GBP 60K per year for a couple of years, it would not be an amazing return on what is a very niche market, and frankly most decent developers could make more money for less effort doing something else. That's basically why there are so few speedway games, and those that exist are done as a labour of love.

Should journalists not be seeking to find out the answers to such questions? Perhaps the answer though, is that the Polish speedway clubs and fans have a different stance to the PZM? After all, you'd hardly say the ACU is very in touch with British speedway. So they shouldn't be concerned about poor attendances?

Possibly just about tolerable 30 years, but never evolved from the 'Smashie and Nicey' style, and he started to forget where he was half the time. Thought it quite funny when he eventually hounded off the centre green at Swindon and had to resort to announcing from the box...

Why? With maybe 2 or 3 exceptions, it's the provincial tracks that have demonstrated longevity. The 'national media' is increasingly irrelevant in the modern world. The printed media is dying a death, whilst television becomes ever more fragmented and 'on-demand'. In many ways there should be more opportunities for speedway through 'new media' as its no longer reliant on cynical hacks who aren't interested in venturing very far from their locals.

We've just developed a simple app for the iPhone which came in at GBP 40K, and currently are developing another more complicated piece of software for GBP 250K. I'd put a speedway game somewhere in-between this in terms of complexity and effort required. There are maybe 150-200K speedway fans in the whole world, going on reported attendances and television viewing figures. A good percentage of those will be old and/or not interested in playing computer games, so let's assume 10% might be interested. You're already down to 15,000 potential customers that you'd have to be charging at least a tenner just to break even, and bear in mind as the price goes up, that will likely decrease your customer base for what would be a niche game.

God forbid anyone should actually ask politicians for some detail. Only a Managing Editor, as we're oft reminded.

That's nothing to do with the EU, or speedway for that matter.