Leaderboard

Three main sports have highlights in addition to as well as live coverage that i know of. BBC has football highlights each week, the same with rugby and often the F1 coverage is highlights only. If the tv companies will not pay a decent amount for live meetings and some clubs feel the payment does not cover their loss, as seems to have been a possible issue this year, then coverage will be limited so a highlights prog is next best, the alternative is no coverage at all. People might want live matches but if the clubs decide against it then so be it, again highlights are better than nothing.

The attendances at the tracks have never gone up in all the time there has been regular televised Speedway

For me having supported the club from the early 70s and I walked away from the club after the towel was thrown in mid season last year - my biggest disappointment of the winter is the total failure of the club to admit it got things very wrong last season - all has been swept under the carpet - yes time to move on time to be positive not negative - glass full rather than glass empty all those sound bites of the winter - but as we approach the season the club still has work to do to get me to attend. But I’m hopeful the promotion will up there game as the first meeting gets closer

I'm not disagreeing with you - I'm simply making the point that noise reduction, along with H and S and other factors, while perhaps inevitable, is making speedway less attractive to many.

How do you think the season will go JC ? does the promotion need to win back the respect of the supporters again i believe so.The dangerous thing for me is there are a few real die hard supporters on here who the club are not that far off losing forever a dangerous situation .I have to say i am not that convinced with the team assembled so far but fingers crossed they are competitive Kings Lynn are a great club and i hope they can mix it this year.For me the important thing is to get the racing back to a good standard god thirty years ago King's Lynn was certainly in the top five racetracks in the U.K now it seems a different track it seems like it is to quick there now but they can get the track back at its best it is a great racetrack.

Just found this in W H Smiths. A fantastic piece of work.

On the other hand how much lower would they have gone if not propped up by TV coverage? You can never know. The money earnt by the sport should have enabled it to invest in itself and thus attract new customers. There were few sports that utterly wasted the opportunity and money but somehow ours managed to. No, the move for years now in sports TV has been away from highlights to live, full-match coverage. Why should be go in the other direction just because we can't run matches efficiently? There is a real world out there and it seems it's not just the BSPA who are unaware. Study the sports TV schedules and see for yourselves how few sports have highlights shows only instead of full coverage. There's not many, and for a very good reason - people want live, full matches, as proved by Sky for nearly thirty years now.

Thanks again Steve. It was scheduled for late on Sunday specifically so it didn't clash with any live speedway meetings. In those days the only Sunday evening track we had to consider was Boston who were normally finished by 9 pm, having a 6.45 start. As you can see we did everything we could not to be a problem. Yes Oxford was one of the areas covered. In those early days we were carried mainly on Rediffusion's 4-channel service which sadly only had patchy coverage over the country. The expected multi-channel cable systems of today were authorised in the 80s but mostly not built until the next decade, by which time Sky was dominant, Screensport had morphed into a European network, and I was long gone.

Nope, however this time he has the chairman on the same team so fingers crossed he can make a bigger difference than I did.

FIM official video Astana 3rd/4th Feb FIM official video Shadrinsk 10th/11th feb

Electric bikes with real bike sound through speakers, even by speedway standards that would be pathetic.

That is possibly because having seen a live meeting with all the delays etc they were put off, which is why a highlights prog would be a good option. If the bspa get rid of all the delays and pointless restarts more people might return to the sport.

During the '60s and '70s, the noise and the smell and (I'm afraid to say) the crashes were a great part of the appeal to many people. Closeness of racing and league success was less important than it is today as, win or lose the spectacle was enjoyable. Todays sanitised product, with the loss of the smell and much reduced noise level has greatly reduced this appeal and I believe is the reason for the disenchantment of many fans and the consequent diminishing gates. I believe the introduction of silent, electric bikes would be the last nail in the coffin for the sport, if indeed it lasts that long!

Thanks for remembering. It was a very long time ago. That show came about after we'd set up the deal to show a prerecorded match once a week. I offered to contribute speedway news to the station's news department (mainly ex-Piccadilly Radio journos who at least knew of Belle Vue) to be read by one of the presenters as part of their new bulletins. I phoned in the first set to the programme controller, Chris Fear (ex-Westward TV and a speedway man) whose response was to invite me up to the studios the following Saturday to present the news myself, initially with him interviewing me then after a couple of weeks 'solo'. Resources were minimal - we couldn't even afford a shoestring. What we did have was the recording of the match to be shown the following night so we took a heat from that as a preview. The whole speedway project was initially run by K.M.Video on their own who recorded several matches for video each week, normally at places like Hackney, Wimbledon and Reading. At each meeting we would record interviews to insert into the weekly news review. We weren't allowed to show any action. So we would only be able to show the one race and the few video companies also making speedway tapes at the time simply weren't producing material technically good enough to broadcast. Indeed KM's equipment wasn't up to the job and after the first match at Hackney an outside firm, Video Anglia was brought in to provide better, vision-mixed cameras working from an admittedly tiny 'scanner' truck (a Renault Trafic where I did the commentary from the front passenger seat). I usually managed to find a guest to help me through the Saturday half hour, starting with Chris Morton. So the format was one race, a couple of interviews, possibly a guest, a comprehensive listing of fixtures for the night and week ahead. The rest was me, working from notes perched on my knee, with slide inserts to relieve the viewer's agony ;-) No, we couldn't run to autocue. No, none exist as far as I can ascertain. We ran weekly through the main season and monthly through the winter so there were over thirty shows a year. We tried. The only feedback we got from the BSPA was "Canterbury are complaining that you're hitting their crowd". Our programme was over by 6 every Saturday... Depressingly it comes as no surprise that some BSPA members are still stupid enough to believe that TV isn't a help. After 30+ years you would hope they'd learned. People wonder why I get frustrated with certain people in speedway? .

Inevitably electric bikes will eventually become normal with the probability that speedway will at some time in the future have to be raced on silent bikes. This may seem horrendous to us, but it would always be possible to play the sound of the bikes over the tannoy whilst the races are in progress. With the proper electrical equipment this should allow the level of the sound to be monitored and adjusted to suit the proximity of residential houses to each track. At many tracks, (such as Birmingham) a high percentage of the spectators watch from inside the bar, so the sound level in the bar could be set at a higher level than outside if need be. This could be a good way of overcoming the so-called noise problem and allow speedway to be staged in venues where houses are very close, so would electric bikes be such a bad thing?

If it has been sorted, Ged will not announce anything, till a statement from BSPA confirms it, or another nail /arrow/spear, will be on its way jimg

You deserve a medal Dave for all the work you, and your Team put in.

I saw Bradley Andrews in a number of meetings last season and it was noticeable how much he improved. There seemed to be more fight in his make-up in the latter half of the season, so I do not think that Cradley fans will be disappointed

There are those of us who have been saying for two years (at least!) that a single senior league of 18/19 teams is the only way to go, even if it means going down to teams of 5 riders + a 3-point reserve doubling up from the NL. People reckon there aren't enough riders to go round, but there were over 350 registered riders on the SCB Rider Registrations as of 25/09/17. That should be more than enough to service 19 teams without losing out on quality of racing. They could even improve riders' earnings by 25% by retaining the 15-heat format, with each of the 6 riders having 5 outings. A single league is the only way to go if speedway is to survive IMO.

spoke to Robin Brundle yesterday and think he's certainly going to make a difference

Thought you found it irrelevant anyway

Hmmm it must be too very , very nice for him to know obviously

To me it's pretty simple, balance means that when good things happen people praise the club and when bad things occur they get criticised. Trouble is the same criticisms have been raked up on dozens of occasions over the winter whereas the last two Friday announcements have hardly been mentioned, that is an imbalance. The comments about poor racing, late starting and finishing, too much grading etc are all perfectly valid but if anybody from the club was going to read them they would have done by now. With a new promoter on board the next step is to see what the first two or three meetings bring in terms of VFM (and there is extra pressure on the club with a £1 increase) and if it's not good then fair enough, get stuck in as it will be deserved criticism. February and March is the time when excitement is meant to rise and people are looking forward to the first meeting and seeing new (and old) faces representing the club, would be nice to see a bit of this while being mindful that there is plenty of work to do for the club to get people back on board and feeling satisfied again. That is balance.

In world superbikes last year they actually allowed the bikes to be louder, as when they cut the decibel level it lost some of what makes bikes racing. Its now louder than ever, and the fans watching live get a better experience. Nothing beats the sound of an inline 4 or a twin at 15,000 revs .

Unfortunately until the human race discontinues to decimate the natural world and ivory, for example (whatever the date it was exploited) is totally banned and deemed worthless, there will be a continual need for animals to be held within some sort of controlled environment...whether it zoos, wildlife parks and reservations otherwise we will continue to see the gradual (albeit increasing) extinction of many species. I grew up when zoos were less than satisfactory (concrete pens with bars) but things have moved on dramatically and there are some superb collections where conservation programmes are the norm.