Chris116

That is the best news I have heard for a long time. Means I can do a few day trips to the island and spend the day on the steam railway followed by speedway in the evening. Already looking forward to seeing my first NORA meeting.

Great to hear that the Council are backing the idea but I have heard of other Councils who have made all the right noises about finding a site for a new track but they then never seem to be keen on giving any sites that are found the required planning permission. A very good first step but still a long road ahead before racing is possible. My best wishes to all involved.

Mike Parker is the only promotor to throw me out of a track. He threw me out of Crayford four times in one evening before a stock car meeting there because of something I had written in a magazine. Trouble was all his staff agreed with me and kept letting me back in. He would have been even more cross if he had known that the staff always let me in for free as I wrote articles for a number of different magazines. He did a lot of good promotion but also damaged both speedway and stox by some of his actions in my opinion.

Rye House Wimbledon Harringay West Ham White City (London) New Cross Wembley Romford Crayford Arena Essex Rayleigh Reading (Smallmead) Eastbourne Canterbury Poole Exeter IOW Somerset Skegness Peterborough King's Lynn Cradley Heath Belle Vue (Hyde Road) Rochdale I have also seen Stock Cars at the following Speedway tracks:- Ipswich Walthamstow Boston Brafield Birmingham Wheels Bradford Coventry (stox and 1000cc sidecars) Leicester (Blackbird Road) Long Eaton Sheffield Crewe Mildenhall Stamford Bridge (for football when the speedway track was still visible) I will edit this list once I remember any more tracks!

In the London area the worst burgers I ever had were at Harringay. Admittedly speedway had finished a few years earlier but I doubt if they were any better in the speedway days and I can say they were dreadful in the stock car and banger days during the 60s and 70s.

I have one of those! It is called the OFF button.

At least that would stop you seeing anything on here and that would mean we didn't have to suffer the rubbish you type! Result, I am sure I could find a bag of rusty nails for you.

That would have been a nightmare journey, much quicker and easier on the central line to Leyton and then either the special bus or a 20 minute walk.

I travelled on the free bus from Leyton station to the Hawks meetings on many occasions. At one time they had buses to a number of different places and used some almost vintage buses on the services which even to a railway enthusiast were quite interesting. A lot of people used the buses but sadly they stopped running them and left people to walk which I know caused some less able supporters to stop going.

The Stock Car and Banger fixtures have been published so the Speedway should be able to work around them.

He didn't cause the closure but he sure got an awful lot of team tactics wrong on a regular basis which caused at least two regulars to stop attending.

So Schroek screwed up the old NL and then did a similar job on the Rye House team in the last years of racing at Hoddesdon.

They can't be sure of when it is possible to run until the Championship fixtures are published. Both teams will be waiting for both leagues fixtures to confirmed before announcing a date only to be forced to change it.

Speedway Star do one, here is the link https://www.speedwaystar.net/store/calendars

Same as those who pay lots of money to watch football only to leave with ten minutes still to play having watched 80 minutes of a boring 0-0 draw. I always like it when that sort of match explodes with three goals in the last 10 minutes. Serves them right and if you enjoy the sport why would you want to miss anything. If you don't enjoy it why bother going in the first place?

From the age of four I was taken to Wimbledon for Speedway. In those days it ran on a Monday evening and even during term time we never missed a meeting and I never suffered problems at school. We never had any stadium bought food. My parents always took a flask of coffee and we stopped at the local sweet shop on our way to the stadium to buy a Mars, Crunchie or other chocolate bar for each of us. Sweets and coffee were had during the interval. My father always bought a programme and when I was old enough I also had one to fill in. These days I print my own race cards for both sports and don't normally buy a programme as most seem to be 24 or more pages of adverts. For Speedway the old programmes tended to be 8 pages which consisted of front cover, administration and advert for next meeting, promoters piece, centre page spread of race card, meet the visitors, sponsors adverts and back cover with fixture list that had results of meetings already run. Such a programme was cheap to produce and most people bought one as they were cheap. Today's magazine programmes have probably one extra article and half a dozen colour photos but the rest is all adverts that never change but you pay for over and over again which does not appear to be very good value. I am happy to agree that some current programmes are better but some are worse.

An often mentioned dislike of many speedway fans is riders who give up when in 4th place in a race. I think a simple way of stopping such things would be to change the scoring system to 4,3,2,1 for the finishers in a race with any rider who does not finish getting 0 and no pay for the race. I think that would ensure it was very rare for a rider failed to finish.

In the recent past they have run Wimbledon, Wisbech, Bovingdon, Swaffham and Birmingham Wheels and longer ago ran Norwich, Reading, Cross-in-Hand, Walthamstow, White City London, New Cross, Oxford, Weymouth and Newcastle.

Yes, they also run Ipswich which has Speedway, plus Yarmouth and the two Incarace tracks at Hednesford Hills and Northampton (Brafield) which don't have Speedway.

Mildenhall stadium is owned by Spedeworth boss Deane Wood.

Definitely one of the greats. I was at the meeting where he broke his leg which caused his early retirement. He was sadly only a shadow of his former self when he returned to racing but still a wonderful rider. Very pleased that I got to watch him every week from August 1957 until that crash brought his career to a temporary end.

I receive the state pension and also have a workplace pension which means that I am comfortable providing I do not try to live beyond my means. If anywhere I go has a reduced price for pensioners then it is very nice but not having a reduction would not stop me from going. In fact in most cases if I have received a reduction I will add that to my budget for food and have more to eat at the meeting.

Ronnie was my hero at Wimbledon and the number of races he enabled a reserve to win a race ahead of one of the super superstars of the day was amazing.

Careful! That sort of common sense is not liked by many in speedway.

I suspect that you will find the three clubs who did not want the 2H + 2A format all had NDL teams and said they would drop out of the NDL which would have possibly finished the NDL.