HenryW

I'm no fan of Miedzinski but I'm not convinced he deserved the exclusion for the clash with Doyle. Doyle lifted and moved to the right entering the turn. I wasn't sure what Miedzinski did wrong in that clash.

Get transponders on the bikes. That would be a good start!

Great stuff from Cookie. Having won both of his GP qualifying meetings so far this year, let's hope he can do it again in Russia!

Dudek is apparently there but touched the tapes in his first ride.

I see the new TV deal from 2019-2021 has been announced. All Extraliga meetings will be televised with 2 on Sunday and 2 on Friday each week, although there seems to be an option that one of the Friday matches may be moved to Saturday on some weeks.

Haha. Fair enough. Good work by Grisha there. Edit - And a fantastic race from Patryk Dudek in heat 10.

Just home from work and have put it on. Anything interesting happened in the first few races?

Am I reading that right, does the last paragraph say that Freddie got them to compromise reliability to improve performance? That sounds like the start of a slippery slope!

The 1983 Cradley team comes close. Erik Gundersen, Simon Wigg, Lance King, Phil Collins, Jan O Pedersen and Alan Grahame all raced in at least one World Final. The 7th regular member of the team, Peter Ravn, was reserve for the 1983 Final but didn't race. Their number 8 that season, who made several appearances in the team, was Simon Cross who also raced in a World Final. I'm not sure if there was any meeting where Cross replaced Ravn.

Yeah, it was called off fairly early after heavy rain this morning.

U is for upadek which means fall.

Rolling averages were the answer and we had them but they got rid of them for the start of the current season. Given the mess they made of the top league averages this season I can understand why they didn't use them this year but it has clearly proved what their benefit is. Hopefully they will be used going forward.

I see that Sportowefakty are reporting a potential problem with tyre availability in the coming weeks. It seems that Mitas have temporarily stopped production of the most commonly used tyre in Polish speedway (not sure if they are currently using a different one from the UK) and haven't given any timescales for when they will resume. Prices for the remaining stock are starting to increase...

Don't forget that 4 of the current GP field are in the qualifiers this year as well. Ricky Wells is the AMA representative with Bradley Wilson Dean taking the MNZ place according to the Abensberg website. The remaining PZM place is still showing as TBC. Does anyone know who is getting that spot? EDIT - Looks like it should be Jakub Jamrog unless he has refused it. EDIT 2 - Just remembered he is out injured...doh!

I believe Hancock abandoned his Peter Johns machinery for that meeting. Not sure if Holder did the same. They couldn't really keep using them at the start of this season when some riders were on adjusted EL averages and others on old PL ones. I think the plan is to use rolling averages going forward but they had to start again after the mess they made of them with the EL race format over recent years.

One of Gorzow's reserves Hubert Czerniawski is currently suspended after being caught with an illegal carb at one of the under 21 matches over there. After that incident they did a round of checks at the next set of Extraliga fixtures and all those tested were OK. The suggestion seemed to be that they were going to increase technical checks now.

????Valentin Grobauer and Danny Maassen raced for Germany with Mikkel Bech and Rasmus Jensen representing Denmark.

Don't know the details of the offer you took up but if you can cancel it after the 2 months it might be worth doing that and then taking up their next offer... they petty regularly have new offers.

Harris is still on his starting average which was the one adjusted for old PL. The Peterborough site says he comes in on 9.27 but presume they really mean 9.21 (9.27 is Ed Kennett's average at the top of the Rye averages) Presumably any new averages from this year will be adjusted between leagues.

Judge for yourself...A couple of the races can be seen here along with the crash.

I know you saw a lot more of Todd during his career than I did, but I'm just not convinced that he was destined for the greatest of heights. I just never saw anything too special in him. You say that he had an edge on the World stage and could raise his game before the injury, but all you have to back this is his 1 good season in 1990. He had the 1991 season before he got injured and didn't show anything spectacular that year. If you are going to work on a "what if" basis then Darcy Ward should probably be on your top 10 list Away from Todd, I'm still trying to get my head around how Sidney can have Tony, Billy and Nicki on a list of riders that never did anything for him...I think Tony and Billy were 2 absolutely amazing racers, and I do mean racers rather than riders. As for Nicki, he usually inspires something in most speedway fans, even if it is just hatred from some

With the following qualified riders and 3 wild card places available for series, who do you all think will get them? Nicki Pedersen Vaclav Milik Krzysztof Kasprzak Leon Madsen Grigorij Łaguta Przemysław Pawlicki Kenneth Bjerre Nicolai Klindt Mateusz Szczepaniak Martin Smolinski Kacper Gomólski Adrian Miedziński The current Nation numbers are: 5 Poland 4 Denmark 1 Czechia 1 Russia 1 Germany I had thought the organisers might have liked to get Jarek Hampel in there, but I can't see any chance of that now that 5 Poles have qualified. Another Dane also seems unlikely with the number they have in there already. With one of the rounds in Sweden, you have to think that they'd probably like a Swede in the series full time. Would they go with the Swede that got closest in the challenge, Kim Nilsson, or maybe prefer to offer an invite to the "big name" of AJ? I'm really not sure who else they might look to bring in. What does everyone else think?

Karpov's crash looked nasty. I was surprised he got away with that one. Not the greatest of racing so far... looks like the best hope for excitement might just be provided by close scores for the qualifying places!

Riders only need to take 3 rides, not 4. Edinburgh chose to only give Mitchell the 3. A lot of us thought that he should have been given heat 14 once the points were sewn up but the Monarchs team manager clearly didn't think so. It can't be helping Mitchell's confidence too much only getting the 3 races most meetings, even when he has a decent night like last night.

I believe that's correct. The final place is for the meeting wildcard at each of the rounds in the final series.