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Auty would need more devil in the first bend because Bridger would already a bike length in front. The first essential for a rider to reach international standard is the ability to gate, and that's something even Auty himself admits he can't do. LBR is a reasonable sometimes good gater, having beaten riders like Kasprak from the gate this year. As usual you lurch into your exaggerations but if you bother to read to previous posts properly you will see that nobody is claiming that LBR is a ,world beater. In fact he is not even riding as a heat leader at the moment, but nor is Kennet for that matter. What we are saying is that while Auty is basically a PL rider in d/u role LBR has not needed to drop down to PL and is good enough to get team places in Poland and Denmark where they wouldn't even think about Auty. LBR still has a long way to go and it remains to be seen whether he will get to be a top rider, even by GB standards but he has got a different attitude this year, working harder on fitness, getting top class machinery, and that is paying off with consistency and heat 15 selections. Still not genuine Team GB standard perhaps (but who is except Bomber and Tai?) but still comes out ahead of Auty on every measurable assessment

Agreed, but the point being made was that although the tac ride is mathematically fairer than the tac sub, it is still perceived as being unfairer because a team appear to make up 7 points (on what would otherwise be a 5-1) rather than 4 points. More important though is the present system of league points which is a far more effective way of maintain interest and , to my mid at least, makes the tac ride/tac sub redundant. The whole t/r t/s thing is an unnecessary complication to what should be a simple sport to follow.

I agree. I accept that mathematically the tactical substitute rule can be shown to be more unfair, but to the average punter who doesn't stand at the trackside with a calculator the perception of a team getting an 8-1 instead of a 5-1 is unfair. I think the point that most people are missing is that the point of the old tac sub rule and also the tac ride in its early days was to maintain interest in a meeting when one team was gaining a big lead. However in those days it was basically a straight win or lose but now we have interest created by a team needing to win by 6 or more to get 3 league points and a team who loses by 6 still get something out of it. This means that effectively a team have to get 13 points ahead (allowing for t/r's) to be sure of getting all three point. With the present system of league points(which I am in favour of, surely the time has come to dump the tac ride/tac sub for once and for all.

Have you ever seen his home tracks in Denmark and Poland ? If not why are you calling them trick tracks ? The fact is that Lewis has got out and got himself jobs in Denmark and Poland so at least it shows he has the ambition. You don't keep a job in Poland in particular, at any level unless you are a good performer home and away. Lewis has been around a long time but people forget he is still only 23. Unlike Worrall and Cooke he his holding down team places on the continent rather than doubling up in the PL. He is I believe younger than Craig Cooke and probably the best under 25 British rider after Tai Woffinden. If the policy is going to be to build for the future and give young riders experience then he has a good claim to a place. Very few speedway riders have peaked by the age of 23 and there is no reason to believe Lewis will not get better.

Getting back to the point of the thread I used to go to grasstracks back in the day when motorcycling was the major part of my life, and yes. it is a good day out IMO but speedway is a different ball game with its teams, points and leagues. Its not a question of one being better than the other they are just different and each have their own attractive qualities. The point that I think needs to be made is that grass-track, like speedway, is struggling, and they are not the only outdoor spectator sports in that situation. That indicates to me that some of speedways problems (and I am not saying all) are outside the control of the BSPA and are indicative of a changing society. So in answer to the point of the thread, yes, grass-track is goes value for money for those who enjoy it, but reducing speedways admission to £10 or any of those puerile suggestions we keep getting on threads here is not going to transform speedway. The problems are much deeper than that and there is no easy answer.

I would agree with all of that except I think that Kennet rather than Worrall is the right choice out of an average bunch. If you put Worrall, Barker or anyone else in place of Kennet its not going to make the difference between second and third, unless someone else has some terrible luck on the night so almost certainly we will go into the race-off. If Kennett, the most logical choice performs reasonably well, then ok he keeps his place for the race-off, but if he flops then replace him with Bridger, Barker or whoever. I suppose you could also say replace Harris or Cook for the race-off if they are out of their depth. Kennett is about 26 now so he deserves this chance and if he flops then that's the end of the road for him, I know SCB says he will flop anyway but I am giving him the benefit of the doubt.

In the last 5years VAT has gone up to 20%, things like insurance has rocketed for everybody, fuel costs have increased, the cost of first aiders has increased but the cost of admission to speedway has only increased by £2 in that period so a lot of costs have been absorbed by the clubs. So the picture you are trying to paint is no quite accurate.

In fairness to Tsunami, I was looking through a Hackney website recently and I found a section with some of Len Silver's programme notes from 1968 in Len which was complaining about guest riders. In the 45 years since those notes were written nobody seems to have come up with a solution so it might be an idea if the "you couldn't make it up" brigade apply there minds to it and let us know what the answer is. I'd love to see an alternative to the guest rider problem but I can't think of one so I await others suggestions with interest.

A good start would be regular meetings so fans get the speedway habit. This is probably the worst season ever for a spasmodic fixture list. Most EL clubs only have 14 home league matches now, so if someone goes to say 10 of them that's only £170 admission over the course of a season which is not a lot of money for most people to spend on entertainment, but when the fixture list is hit and miss and matches cancelled on a whim and at a moments notice people get used to spending their money on other things. So if we could get some consistency of the fixture list and if the rules were applied transparently and fairly so all teams had a fair crack of the whip, that wouldn't solve all the sports problems but it would be a big step in the right direction.

Their average wage is less than a third of ours so in relation to average income its like spending three times as much to get in (£36), so be careful what you wish for.

Jack Parker, Split Waterman, Peter Craven, Ove Fundin, Barry Briggs, Ivan Mauger, Ole Olsen, Peter Collins Malcolm Simmons, Bruce Penhall, Hans Nielson,car mechanics by day ? News to me. If we apply your logic and remove names like those and other top riders from speedway history the sport would be in a worse state than it is now. In any sport its the top stars that draw the crowds. People moan about a watered down league as it is. If you got rid of the all the top stars people are not going to flock to see second strings because its only 10quid. More to the point the big names bring in the sponsors and in many ways that is just as important in terms of cash flow as punters through the turnstiles. Of course costs are spiralling to a ridiculous degree, everybody accepts that, but getting rid of highly paid riders is not going to solve the problem.

That's correct. I only mentioned costs because many people overlook the basics which are quite a lot of money before you even think about paying the riders. As you say you would have to more or less double the crowd to break even.

If the admission cost is £10 then almost £2 of that is V.A.T. It costs around £2000 to hire the stadium and roughly £600 for first aid, then you have the cost of shale, repairs to air fences, insurances and other overheads, losses due to rain-offs, accountancy and book-keeping. printing plus all the other overheads of running a business before you start paying riders I would love some of those who reckon the sport could be run on what is effectively an £8 admission after VAT to tell us how they work the sums out and their basis for saying the crowd increase would be sufficient to break even let alone show a profit.

Which clubs were packed to the rafters ? Len Silver at least never made much money from promoting speedway and in the 60's and 70's was selling cars to subsidise his speedway promotions, then in later years Rye House was kept going by subsidies from his winter sports company. The concluding paragraph of chapter 13 of Len's book, dealing with what some imagine to be the golden era of the 1970's states;- "Every year it became tougher and tougher to earn a living from promoting speedway and I found myself having to work harder at selling cars in order to subsidise both Hackney and Rye House"

You are making me feel flippin' old now !

It took two pages for someone to post a bit of common sense on this thread but we got there in the end !

You had me struggling as I thought I only had a George O'Dell left in the pack then I remembered Helmut Fath up my sleeve which trumps all of them. Proper chairs in them days. Happy days indeed.

You have got me thinking now. Chris Vincent has been retired about 100 years and the only Terry I can remember from those days is Terry Vinicombe who was another racer. Can you remember any more about it ? I thought the landmark ruling on all this was a moto-cross rider who successfully sued the organisers of a meeting because he was injured on a track that was dangerous but I can't remember all the details

:lol:

The highlighted part is really the nub of this particular part of the discussion. Talent is one thing, mental strength is something quite different. A rider might have the natural flair to perform well on certain occasions when things go well but converting that into winning a world title with all its various difficulties along the way is something that few can do.

Sorry if you find it annoying if I use English in its every day sense, but if we take your use of the expression "at the time" in the way you now say it was intended then presumably we could also say that when Gary Havelock won the World Title it was unprecedented at the time and when Bomber won the British GP that was also unprecedented at the time. Is that correct ? If so, then I am sorry if I am being obtuse but I am not sure how discussion of John Louis achievements at the time take the discussion any further forward. If riders achievements are to be judged "at the time" then surely that supports my point the one cannot compare riders of different era's and we just have appreciate great riders for what they are without comparing one generation with another. Please try to clarify to us thicko's without getting annoyed. It is, after all only a discussion.

Not quite. His first WF was a5th then 4th then 3rd. Unprecedented ? Depends how you look at it. I would suggest Tommy Price 13th then 1st and Peter Craven 15th then 1st set the standard by reason of taking the top prize at the second attempt. Of course, if you extend "English" to become "British " then we get to include Freddie Williams, winner at his first attempt followed by 7th, second and 1st again. The more you juggle it the more you are stuck with the fact that you cannot compare era's. Just accept great riders for what they were.

That is a good point and it ties in with an earlier post (which I think also came from Bwitcher) that we tend to remember a riders best performances and forget the less impressive. In the year Mort won the inter-continental final had just about scraped through the British Final in 8th place, then went on to a good win in the inter-continental, but when the real deal came along, the World final, he was back in 9th and behind 7 of the riders he had beaten in the Inter-continental. Again, this is not an attack on Mort but it demonstrates that when the dust settles we remember mainly the high spots and that distorts our perception over the years. In the same way, when Harris becomes a respected retired rider he will be dining out on his GP win rather than the disappointments of later years.

It still all if's and buts. The point being made, building on SCB's very good post about juggling with facts and figures is that cam argue until you are blue in the face but you cannot really compare era's. FWIW, Mort would come very high up on my assessment of riders but I can't put forward a convincing argument to back it up. Its just a personal impression, that's the whole point. Was Mort better than Michael Lee or Bruce Penhall ? Obviously not. Were Penhall and Lee better than Holder or Gollob? Not many people would say one way or the other. So Morton was around 6-10 places behind the World Champions of his day and Harris was around 6-10 places behind the top riders of his day. That's about as much as we can say without getting involved in impressions and unreliable memory. Let's leave it at that.

We can take that a stage further. Bomber was good enough to beat the worlds best in a single meeting, which Morton never was, so if the 2007 British GP had been an old style World Final (which at Cardiff it might well have been) Bomber would have a World Title to his name. It was by any standards a great win and he was best on the night. So if that had happened would we now be comparing Bomber with single winners like Michanek, Collins, Lee, and Ermolenko or would we be comparing him to likes of Szczakiel and Muller, who on paper at least were good enough to win a World title but are regarded as lesser men than the others. Was Bomber better than Kenny Carter ? Can you trust the record books ?