E I Addio

Of course stadium availability need to be looked at but unless and until it is and we know what availability there might be and at what cost, none of these other ideas get of the ground. What we do know is that most stadiums have other things going on which they may not be prepared to move. Tai's interview was a typical piece of slap-dash Speedway Star journalism, merely reporting someone's comment's to create potential controversy. It is a pity that SS couldn't be bothered to develop the them and investigate stadium availability and let us know why and how things are different in Sweden and Poland, such as whether speedway competes with other sports in the same stadiums and a whole range of things that would be informative to the readers but as always they just went for the easy headline at minimum effort. As for Tsunami asking how much it would cost, well cost is a pretty important factor, and orion's post quite surprised me actually because he normally is quite astute on the money side of things. Most of the posts on this thread are more of a wish list rather than a reasoned analysis of how it could be made to work..

Timbo was one of those who "liked " Frigbo's post which, if you bother to read post 4 on the thread stated that Woofy's comments were a typical riders selfish point of view and as most clubs don't own their own stadia its not up to them. Unless the question of stadium availability is addressed all these other ideas go out the window.

The quoted post was the third post on the thread. It had 14 "likes" . Post No 4 was an almost identical post by Frigbo and that had another 13 "likes", so a lot of people clearly thought they were sensible posts. 18 pages of pie-in-the sky ideas later and nobody has yet been able to deal with the fundamental point that stevehone makes. If stadium owners don't go along with the idea the whole thing falls flat. Plus the fact that fixed costs of running the stadium will be the same whether they run a speedway meeting or not so if there are then less meetings there will be less income from rent so unless the rent per meeting goes up speedway becomes an even less attractive source of income. Then there is the point that Mick the muppet mentioned that if it was all on the same night what happens if your number one is injured and you can't get a guest because everyone else is racing that night ? If people are going to say we need a squad system where is the money for that coming from ? Increased admission charges ? Or do we assume that a single race night will bring in such an increase in crowds that there will somehow be enough money to pay for a 10 man squad ? The idea of a single race night might be alright in theory but these fundamental things have to be addressed first. Go back to posts 3 and 4 from stevehone and Frogbo and tell me why they are wrong because at the moment I can't see it.

Fair comment but neither that nor any other plan will work unless there is serious programme for training youngsters and that in turn depends to some extent on the popularity of the sport. In the short term I don't see how we can manage without a reasonable number of foreign riders until we get a good supply of British youngsters coming through. As I understand the situation at the moment the problem is not lack of training facilities (although there are not many) it is the lack of young riders to fill them . Until we get sufficient numbers of good riders of our own coming through the system we will need foreign riders. But if we do get good riders of our own coming through they will want to earn a decent living or they will be off to pastures new so its very much a circular problem.

It costs £13 to get into a stock car meeting at Arena and with no prize money to payand nobody to fly in from abroad the meetings are infinitely cheaper to run than speedway meetings. They have no shortage of people forking out £13 to watch a load of old wrecks from the scrapyard chugging into each other, Plenty of people fork out £40 to watch a football (yawn ) match, so clearly people can afford the price. If the admission is £12 the promoter gets £10 after taking off the VAT. Do the sums. It costs around £20,000 to stage an EL meeting . Work out how many it needs through the gate to break even at whatever price you want to charge. The shortfall has to be made up by the sponsors and anything else comes out of the owners pocket. its all very well pontificating over admission costs when you are not the one whose pocket get hit if the books don't balance. 4.25 pm and I am just off the M25 a few miles North of the track and it is pouring down in torrents. No doubt the sun will be out at 8 o'clock but to be honest I would be surprised if the track could take much of this kind of rain. , especially after the heavy shower we had earlier. p.s. It's just starting to thunder as well now.

Bwitcher, this is a discussion forum and calling people stick in the muds because they happen to not agree with you does not advance the course of sensible discussion. If you wan to advance e a particular point of view then other forum are members are entitled to scrutinise it and play Devils advocate. That doesn't make them stick in the muds. Speedway is beset with all kinds of problems and unless many of these are corrected then there is no evidence that changing to a single race night will make a scrap of difference. To illustrate: I know two people who now take virtually no interest in the sport and the reason they give is that they are sick of the T/R rule. I doubt that is the only reason but to them the rule is what stands out in their minds in keeping them away. I have heard of other fans who say the same thing and some have posted on here and said so. It doesn't bother you because you happen to like the rule but changing the race night is not going to win those fans back . I am not talking about those fans in particular but merely illustrate the point that many fans are really fed up with similar things relating to the rules and especially the inconsistent application of them. As another example there is another thread currently running about rolling at the starts which is an irritation to many fans. I was at a meeting recently where I heard that the Clerk of the Course actually pointed out to the referee that a particular rider was constantly rolling. The ref's answer was " Oh he's not rolling very much". No, not much , just enough to get a flyer and give the paying public a FTG win instead of a proper race. What's the point of having rules if referee's don't enforce them ? They are not going to suddenly enforce them because everyone races on the same night. How many posts have there been on this forum even within the last few weeks where referees have made shocking decisions, sometimes calling all 4 back when someone goes down on their own and at other times doing the exact opposite and excluding a rider who was clearly knocked off by another when it should be all 4 back ?. You have even posted on some of these incidents yourself . None of that will suddenly change simply by everyone racing the same night. On the other hand if the rules were followed and followed consistently it is quite possible a lot of fans will be tempted back what ever night of the week. Similarly meetings that drag on for ages on one night are not going to suddenly run to time another night. So IMO as a potential stick in the mud I am not convinced that anyone will be tempted back by a single race night unless the basics are sorted out first. Changing the race night before getting the rest of it sorted is putting the cart before the horse IMO.

Exactly. The reality that the most popular race nights from the public point of, view would be at the weekends. Thus we have 4 EL clubs racing on a Friday or Saturday, plus David Gordon says when he gets the new stadium he wants to move towards the end of the week hand Rick Frost was quoted as saying he would prefer an Friday race night. The only ones who want a Monday race night are the GP riders. It seems that the riders of quality not actually in the GPs don't mind when they come as long has the money is good, but since the crowds are not great the money is not great , and the reality is that star riders don't make up the shortfall of what is lost by an unpopular racenight. No body could have invested more than Rick Frost did at Peterborough, plus he promoted a popular race track, but after 5 years and half a million quid he was miles short of balancing the books.

Not if clubs are going under in the short term. Lakesides attendance is based on an 8pm Friday night start when parents can take their kids who don't have to be up for school the next day. When Andreas Jonsson rode for Lakeside a few years ago some meetings were switched to Wednesdays when AJ had a GP at the weekend and attendances plummeted. Even AJ could not pull in a profitable crowd on a mid-week night. The result was that they had to let AJ go and have never employed a GP rider since, in order to maintain Friday race nights. Stuart Douglas said that he might as well stand on Dartford Bridge throwing suitcases of money off as race on a mid week night. Jon Cook said he would like to have more Saturday meetings if he could because the crowds are better still on the 2 or 3 Saturdays they do race at home. This is the trouble. People come up with these brainwaves about single race nights without looking at costs implications and the effect on attendances or the availability of the stadium.

But Sainsbury's, Tesco hand the local newsagent all know they have to stock a range of products from budget to top quality to cater for all tastes. British Speedway needs riders of some degree of quality if not GP riders. If Tesco stocked budget products only they would lose a lot of customers. Same with speedway.

Ah I see. Its perfectly clear now. With that sort of infallible logic you could have a great future with the BSPA, re- writing the rule book. It would make a great deal more sense.

Not sure who "they" are but it's Oscar Wilde that is credited with saying that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit. Sorry didn't mean to rain on your parade but I am quite a fan of Oscar Wilde and I needed to clear his name.

Add Lakeside to the list. As you say it's absolutely nothing to do with track surface etc, more to do with the FIM's pedantic safety standards. Plenty of tracks don't want FIM Accreditation because it's not worth the hassle and expense involved. This musy be one of the stupidest OP's in the history of the BSF.

That was your sixth consecutive post that was absolutely nothing to do with the topic under discussion. Before you drift into a seventh diatribe maybe it might be worthwhile start a separate thread for matters of indignation, circuitinium and general windbaggery. so the rest of us can stay on topic.? (No reply required) As to the programme we already knew in general terms what the life of a top rider entails but I thought it put in sharp focus the combination of early mornings, late nights, lack of sleep and arriving at airports at unearthly hours. Like several other posters I found it difficult to come to terms with the tattoos (never look clean to me) but Tai's a speedway rider and plenty of others have them . Maybe its part and parcel of the nomadic lifestyle that in many ways is not the life the rest of us would choose. I thought the programme was very well made and got away from the perception that speedway riders are thick yobs with their brains in their throttle hand and Tai came across as being very personable. Never particularly been a Tai fan myself but the more I see him the more I warm to him as a person. The surprising thing , I thought was Peter Adams house. Speedway seems to have been very good to him, better than its been to a lot of riders in fact.

An EL rider in the same meeting said it was Smolinskis fault. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Very difficult for those of us that weren't there to make a definitive judgment on the basis of one camera shot from the other side of the track. It does however show how difficult it would be for referees to make decisions on dangerous riding unless they have several camera shots available which of course would be impossible apart from televised meetings.

Therein lies the problem. Not only is it a fine line but who decides where the line is drawn ? We already have lots of near 50/50 calls as it is (Bomber and Scott last Monday being a classic example) and once you start deciding whether a move was hard riding or dangerous you will get all kinds of inconsistencies with some riders thrown out when they should arguably stay in and others being kept in when they should go out.

Good post. I totally agree action needs to be taken to avoid a precedent being set. If it is acceptable for a rider to try to enhance his own gate then equally one might say it is just as acceptable to interfere with someone else's gate. What if Tai went out and scraped dirt off the other gates or poured water on them ? Nothing in the rules to say he can't do that before the riders come under starters orders. The referee should have taken control of the situation but he didn't so we can't blame Tai for weak refereeing but there has to be at least some kind of guideline set for what a rider can or cannot do to the gate.

If Lambert ever finds himself on the same piece of track that N. Pedersen Esq wants to be on he might well find the word "ruthless" means a lot more than he thinks it means. If Lambert finds himself wanting the same piece of track that Tai is on he might well find that having a racing brain is of a bit more use than calling yourself ruthless. Like most on this thread, I am not Tai's biggest fan but can't take anything away from what he has done in the last couple of seasons. For a while last year I just thought he was very lucky with the gaps opening for him at the right time but when it goes on this long then obviously its not all luck, and he is undoubtedly an intelligent racer. The only down side IMO is that for his age he has already suffered quite a lot of injuries around the collar-bone and arms and if he takes many more bad knocks in that area its quite possible injuries will catch up and curtail his career at the very top.

The Lakeside pits are open to the public until around 30 min before the start then have to be cleared for safety reasons.

A great rider and a thoroughly nice bloke. Simmo always seemed to be able to combine a strong desire to win with a great sense of fun. We shall not see the like of him again.

Sad news indeed. I am not normally one to bang on about stars of the past but Simmo wlas something very special. As others have said he was is a really nice guy in addition too being a top rider. Somehow he managed to get to the top without the overt ruthless steak that a lot of lesser men feel is necessary. A great all-round motorcyclist with massive natural talent. I also heard that former West Ham and Wembley star Tony Clark died recently so links with speedways past are disappearing.

Clinical depression is not feeling fed up or lack of strength of character. I have never suffered from it myself and used to think it was something you could shrug off until I came into one or two strong people who suffered from it. As I understand it, clinical depression is something that can be caught just like catching flu or shingles. You can't think your way out of it. It can affect different people in different ways but someone who I know who has it describes it as being fine some days then another day he will wake up and can't make a simple decision like what shirt to wear. Its very difficult for those of us that don't suffer from it to understand. Of course there are some people who say they are depressed when they are just a bit down and consumed by self-pity just as some say they have a migraine when they only have a headache or say they have the flu when they only have a cold but genuine clinical depression is not a nice thing. M.E. is thought to be caused by the same family of illnesses that cause depression and that is another thing that causes wrong signals to be sent to the brain causing the sufferer to feel permanently tired.

Well we know Tai is, and I know that Lewis is because he told me last year. I don't know about the others but at the top level the sport is all about keeping your BMI down. How do you think it is that all those that get to the top look so skinny these days? Look at them without their kevlars on and see how skinny their legs are. Freddie Lindgren was talking about it in Speedway Star a couple of years ago. He said some riders are virtually starving themselves to keep their weight down. Admittedly a lot of these diets they have are very hi-tech and scientifically calculated and I might be totally wrong about it but with Freddie talking about it I just wonder if some bodies are not cut out for it. Who knows. The general point is that its easy for us to find fault from a distance and jump to conclusions but we don't really know what goes on in riders lives and why some suddenly start underperforming.

Just a thought. Lewis, Tai, Bomber, Ed Kennett, and Ben Barker all performing well below their best at the moment. Maybe it is purely coincidence, maybe they are all loosely connected by some common thread that is directly or indirectly connected to the pressures of modern speedway, the travelling, the constant need to perform, the special diets and everything that goes with it. Maybe there is a connection or maybe there isn't , none of us on the outside know the answer, but this is the time fro the fans to back off a bit and give our guys some breathing space and not be to quick to be judgmental about any of them. The thread about Bomber was in particularly bad taste with people who don't even know the guy making all kinds of judgments about what the future holds for him. Time for the fans to give them all a bit support. The bottom line is we want to see them all at their best so let's get behind them. http://www.lakesidehammers.co/content/

Bit of a rough diamond but also a bit of a character who, at the end of the day has been a good servant to British Speedway. I wish him well

Are you dyslexic or something ? The figure he actually mentioned was 595 cc. Even when I practically led you to it you still manage to come up with "598cc or something" . The whole point is to illustrate the way you constantly fail to read posts properly then shoot from the hip with all kinds of inaccurate information. The age of 21 is the age you have to be to apply for a licence to drive a machine up to that capacity on the road. It doesn't support your argument that the law of the land doesn't apply to speedway or other sports. If you were riding a machine of that capacity in a road trial or rally on public roads you would still need a licence. The fact that it was a sporting event does not give exemption from legal requirements. However, the context of your post was about possible violence or assaults on the track . What you said was:- But i guess you just have to wonder about the incident last night and if a rider had have kicked Lambert when he was on the track that could well have caused a major incident.You can't compare speedway with driving on the roads,because if that incident last night had happened on a street then someone might....should have ended up in prison.In speedway or in many other sports the law of the land doesn't apply The "incident last night" you are referring to was clearly the Richrd Hall / Josh Auty affair and you talk about if it happened in the street someone would have ended up in prison. The fact of the matter is that the law of the land does apply to such an incident on the sports field /arena but like anywhere else it depends on someone reporting it to the police and them then having enough evidence to prosecute. In the real world these relatively minor incidents don't usually get reported (and I presume Auty is not reporting it) so it will go no further but there have been criminal and civil prosecutions in the past as a result of assaults between sporting competitors. That is the point being made, and that is the point you are wrong about. Auty could, if he was so minded, and if he was hurt and if there was sufficient evidence press charges. However, all the waffle you are bringing up is not relevant to the matter under discussion, which is whether Lambert was justified in his strop by saying he won't ride for team GB because the "authorities"(as he calls them") won't waive the rules for him.