moxey63

I genuinely label speedway in the same bracket as wresting, or even when Popeye steps in to save Olive Oil from the hands of Bluto in the vintage cartoons. In wrestling, the guy who is being thrown about like a Bonfire Night Guy, but summons enough strength in the end to win the day. We know it's not real, genuine. Popeye's the same. He uses his available tin of spinach and comes come at the end. The good guy always wins. Speedway has gone the same. I'd say (usually) Poole have fathomed out the precise time to use the spinach, having gone much of the summer looking like that home-made Guy doll.

Those who already go are probably best suited to introduce new fans. I was introduced by a current fan. I introduced my youngest brother when he was 11, giving him a blank programme and showing him how to fill it in before he even attended a match. As he has said a few times, if he didn't know what it was all about and didn't know the scoring, he'd probably have not returned. That is why live matches on TV might not be encouraging new fans. It is a great spectacle but after a while, even cake becomes boring. New fans have got to understand the scoring system. Forget the rules, as they would have new fans running to the hills.

Speedway Star did a piece the other week questioning speedway clubs' season-long chopping and changing of riders. The article was bang on. The season is just a continuation of practice matches. Perhaps if sides lost a certain number of match points for every change they made, they wouldn't be so hasty.

Too right. The new Belle Vue seriously rivals Hyde Road and leaves Odsal, which I thought was just a rev-and-go track, in its wake.

It would be nice for any track to return. But why do we want to revive a failing speedway that couldn't make it pay when it had just won the Elite League? Odsal was too big for domestic activity but could be kept in the background should Cardiff kick it out. In 1997, when Odsal closed, Belle Vue claimed it was them paying the highest rent of about £1400 and all other clubs - including Bradford - had it easy. The current Bradford owners charged the Rugby £78,000 rental per match. Speedway couldn't afford that.

Bobble hat and yearbars.

I saw the Invisible Man at most tracks.

If speedway had a sudden upturn in support, all new fans, how confident would it be of keeping them? It needs a big shake up, then new fans won't be put off by thinking there are, for example, two or three of Chris Harris, Scott Nicholls, Craig Cook. In fact, two or three of most riders. One rider, one team. Make it a serious sport before we pretend it has a chance, of not just attracting new fans but keeping them.

Surely footage of the 1976 Grand Prix is out there, somewhere. It was a great tournament. Obviously it shrunk in size after the initial two years. Each top flight track staged a round. In 1978 and '79 British riders' scores also counted towards British World Championship qualification. In 1980 I think there were just four rounds. But the summer of '76 was a special year, sponsors the Daily Mirror having reports of each meeting the following day. I even filled in the score grid published in Speedway Star for the 1977 rounds. Magic days.

I saw a post on the internet from a British club prospective giving the thumbs up to three of its riders' scores for Polish clubs. One of the only ways speedway can return to attracting fans is to return British speedway to a sport where there's an affinity between rider and fan. How far it has drifted from this is surely shown by the example I started with. Celebrating your British club riders' score in another league is a bit like you, the fan, allowing your mate to take out your girlfriend because it reduces costs to you both and she gets the best of both worlds. In the meantime, she doesn't know if she's coming or going and yet is expected to give both of you her full attention. As her boyfriend, you, the fan, becomes disillusioned with it all and look somewhere else for your desires. There has to be loyalty. Otherwise, why, as a supporter, bother putting aside best part of a night to travel miles, pay a king's ransom to watch, witness two sides made up of somebody else's guys, feel a bit weird cheering on these fallas who are merely just borrowing your club colours... Speedway is just a sport filled with riders who act like they are on zero-hour contracts and will ride anywhere and for anyone. For starters, as a fan you have got to drink, eat and breathe your local club. You have got to hurt when the team gets beaten, worry when a rider is off form or injured... It has got to be that important that you bother showing up at trackside to support them. By allowing riders to spread themselves so thinly, we have lost much of the passion from fans to show up and support their so-called team.

At least Redcar are putting in a bit of effort and trying to keep the fans they have. Perhaps a questionnaire could be sent out to all the fans who have stopped attending and find those reasons - and I don't mean just Redcar here?

I think they came in during the early-to-mid 90s. Although I suspect the costs of those were higher, there are a multitude of factors why we are where we are.

But football is properly run. No golden goal when a team is behind; no doubling up and down; players not commuting and facing burn-out and impacting overall performance for each team; no not knowing if the match is on or off, or what time it'll end; supporters getting to know their team for longer than a couple of weeks before musical chairs and the big shake-up for the play-off begins..... I could go on. Football has the clout because of SKY money; but SKY has the clout because of football. Speedway had its chance with SKY cash. But, as that annoying saying goes: We are where we are. Only Boris Johnson is allowed so many chances to mess up.

But, do you know what, I don't get upset with what Team GB do anymore. When you grew up supporting your local team first, then the riders who often went off in various directions for the British League Individual events, if England ( as it was at the time) did well, that was extra custard on your crumble. It was better of course if your club favourites - Peter Collins and Chris Morton - brought the World Pairs back for England and Belle Vue. They may look the part in their team suits, but I can't say I could gain any National pride cheering on Cook, Harris or Lambert. Would much rather roar on a local side in domestic racing.

Speedway is like that bloke, Michael Carroll, who won £9.7 million on the lottery in 2002 but blew it all within eight years and had to return to his old job as a bin man.

Two things that came from SKY's coverage which, I feel, damaged the sport: Golden Doubles and Play-Offs.

The SKY coverage during the first 10 years at least should have put speedway on a sound footing. Had real business people been running the sport, no doubt it would have done. For two-to-three years from 1999 there were real signs speedway was on the up. Crowds seemed to be improving and SKY really did recognise viewing figures were good for its network of channels. We had our faces painted and kids were let in for a quid on the evening SKY rolled up for a live broadcast. There did seem to be a hint of proper promoting by those who had lazily worn the tag for yonks beforehand. But it didn't really last. It drifted into being taken for granted, speedway being on TV every week, and sometimes twice. I felt the sport - promoters and fans - thought SKY and the influx of cash would always be there. We even began having long faces when certain matches weren't on SKY, despite all they had done for us. Fans began getting picky when commentators were pronouncing riders' names wrong, or if certain teams featured more than theirs. That afternoon SKY had its cameras set up for the Riders' Championship at Coventry, when the promoter was scrambling on the floor looking for the dummy he'd just spat out, that was the final nail for SKY. They had so many rained-off meetings towards the end, I believe they decided to cut their loses. They were a professional broadcasting company working within an amateur sport. They couldn't drag it up to their level. For example, how many times did live matches overrun? BT have only half-heartedly accepted it, but we should be thankful for small mercies and not start bickering of who's doing a bad job and who you'd like to see on the panel. I often look at some of the dross SKY are covering during the summer months and cannot believe how the sport messed up its opportunity and is no longer featured. As a fan, I don't really know the ins and outs. But I do recall the amount of money SKY used to shell out setting up all the gear, and then the match was washed out. They aren't a charity and won't put up with it. BT also. I look at speedway, 20 years after SKY could have saved it, and see a dangerous shortage of riders with clubs having to share them, like the last cigarette being passed around by kids behind the bike sheds. I see clubs going weeks without a match in the height of summer, which will surely mean some fans will simply get out of the habit and get used to the cash in their pockets. Meanwhile, fans are expected to tune in to the GPs and see many of the riders (or their type) who put two fingers up at Britain and merely used it like a Tom Cat when the female was in season. Fans are expected to turn up trackside and support riders in their team who aren't even their riders. It's like visiting someone in hospital you don't know and wishing them to get better. It's not someone you know and love. In fact, you ask yourself why bother turning up at the bedside every week to wish someone you don't know get better. Looking at British speedway right now, I see remnants of what might have been, ghosts of live matches on SKY and all the missed opportunities. That could have been the sport's saviour. It should have. But look at it now. How many lives does it have remaining for British speedway to mess up?

I have the meeting from Russia on in the background. Thank go I don't have to keep putting 50p in the electric - I'd be skint by now. It has gone on for too long. I doubt very much that youngsters will put up with such drawn out events. Like watching the Eurovision - and, yes, we don't have a chance in this either.

There would clearly have to be some form of migration period. Obviously, my main concern is the plight of British speedway. Perhaps riders investing so heavily in current engines are really, to be blunt, the reason the sport is heading for the iceberg. It isn't Formula 1, it is a working class sport, the next step up from grasstrack racing. If a different engine is introduced to help cut costs, surely the riders with a backlog of banned engines could be able to use them abroad or even trade them in with someone racing abroad. We are talking cutting costs here, and surely any rider would want that? If you are going to use the argument of riders having a back-jam of engines they won't be able to use, we'll never get beyond this point.

The lower the crowds are, the more expensive admission will be and the more it'll alienate hard up supporters. Much of the admission money, I may be wrong, will be paid by the promoter to the rider, who then pay a fair amount of what he has just earned to keep his engines in pristine shape. It is money going out of the sport and league speedway will not be able to withstand it for much longer.

Just watched the 2-valve race via YouTube. You cannot tell any difference in speed. If rolling back to 2-valves cuts costs and ultimately slows down speedway's decline, then what's stopping it, even for domestic racing if nothing else? There is too much money going out of the sport because of what we all thought was just progress and faster engines.

I suppose you are right about fans not really caring for history and results which have happened years back. But for any serious sport there should be a record of each season. As the mammoth amount of its missing results signify, I'd say speedway has never been a serious sport. I guess it has always been a live-for-today type of game. We may as well forget how many titles Ivan Mauger won, or Hans, Tony and Erik. Or scrub off what the crack Belle Vue teams achieved in the past, Poole, Wembley and Wimbledon too. I'd best mention Oxford, Cradley, Ipswich and Coventry. The first page you go to when you pick up a programme before the meeting is usually the one with line up. The first thing you go to when you pick up a programme from 30 or 40 years ago is the riders' scores. Nothing else from the match exists. Just the scores. And they are important if you want to cement the sport's foundations and not merely as a one-night fix until the time fans leave the stadium on the night. Short-termism has always been speedway's downfall. By the way, I collect stats and am a nerd. So I'd back my opinion!

If a speedway result has happened, it should be Speedway Star's job to include it. The sport has been robbed of 90-plus years of archive material because magazines - not just the Star - failed to include details of meetings. That is why the sport's history is so patched-up. Anyone who has tried to piece it together will know this. For example, I have two random examples: I'd have included all the results of the mid-70s training school matches which the Star only gave details of occasional ones. Another I can recall are details of the 1984 Belle Vue Junior Championship were not listed in the magazine. I attended the latter meeting but didn't fill in my programme. Depending on the Speedway Star to fix that the following week was my mistake. We didn't have the internet then, and so these results could fall from existence, unless people kept the programme. If a speedway match is being raced in Britain - yes, even two sides in a training school afternoon, the Southern Track meetings - I would try to find somewhere in the corner of the magazine to include it. Only when you have researched for speedway history do you realise the chance to recall some matches have been lost for good, because magazines of the day failed their job. I know we have the internet now, and results are online. But the results that nobody can find, which magazines of the day failed to include, will always be lost.

If Speedway Star wanted to dramatically increase its circulation, may I suggest ditching the speedway content and focusing its entire edition to news of the Royals, the Reality TV world and all those throw-away stories of X-Factor contestants. Otherwise, while its carrying the Speedway Star title, perhaps that's the reason its customers are buying it.

While we are on the subject of race times and whether they can be trusted. Thought I'd share this gem with you: June 23, 2008 SKY SPORTS’ electronic timer recorded Jason Crump’s Heat 1 win as a new track record. The 55.9 was a full second lower than the record time set two weeks before. The Sports' channel always used their electronic timer when covering matches live. Immediately the new record time came under scrutiny from Crump himself, who stated he did not feel he was going that fast and also added he had slowed down on the last lap because he was so far ahead. Only when the race was replayed in the SKY studios they registered a time of 58.0 seconds - 2.1 seconds slower than the electronic board clocked - and confusion reigned as to what had gone wrong with the timer. Nobody came close to the supposed new record for the rest of the meeting – Crump recorded next fastest, 57.8 in Heat 6. Belle Vue’s regular timekeeper said all the other races agreed with the times he had taken. One theory was that Ipswich’s Piotr Swiderski had retired in the race in question and the SKY clock had stopped when he crossed the line with Crump still coming round on his last lap. Belle Vue contacted the BSPA about having the time checked and revised. The SKY time was annulled. Crump lowered the track-record again, ironically against Ipswich in August, clocking a time of 56.8 - only one tenth of a second quicker than his previous (official) best (56.9) against Eastbourne in June.