Belle Vue -v- Swindon 19th August

[colin wood 249]

Did not go tonight I never thought it would be on.It rained all day and the sensible thing would have been an early call off.However the track was bladed prior to the Leicester match and despite similar weather I think Zagar equalled the track record.The track has got great drainage but sometimes you have to make sensible decisions especially regarding travelling fans.

[ouch 1,191]

http://www.bellevueaces.co/newsitem.aspx?id=1863

 

Apology from Belle Vue website.

Tickets can used whenever or a full refund.

[Bald Bloke 3,287]

Maybe they will put it down to experience..If in doubt blade it ASAP.

[bellevueace 913]

Well another pr disaster for the club. Why the track work didnt start around 4.30- 5.00pm i dont know. I was stood at the front of the stadium around 6.30 when a couple of people came up to me asking where you buy tickets and how do you get into the grandstand, obviously new to the sport and the stadium, after this latest shambles im sure they wont be in a rush to return. After the opening meeting disaster it appears lessons have not been learned, we have a fantastic new stadium, best track in the country, and a team top of the league. Yet still past mistakes are revisited, the crowd was woeful anyway and ive no doubt many yet again will have been alienated. After all the trials and tribulations of delivering this stadium all that good work is being undone by very poor management. I posted a couple of seasons ago i believed this promotion would deliver this facility but would not have the ability to run it to its full potential. What i witnessed tonight sadly does not make me change my mind. I feel the promotion are out of their depth, this is a great oppertunity to launch the club into a new golden era and that is being squandered. Imagine the Facenna brothers or Matt Ford for example having a stadium like this in a major city, the public awareness and the complete running of the club would be far more professional. You only get one oppertunity to create a good first impression, that was lost at the grand opening, tonight did nothing to convince me the promotion are learning from their mistakes.

[horneymikh 86]

Well another pr disaster for the club. Why the track work didnt start around 4.30- 5.00pm i dont know. I was stood at the front of the stadium around 6.30 when a couple of people came up to me asking where you buy tickets and how do you get into the grandstand, obviously new to the sport and the stadium, after this latest shambles im sure they wont be in a rush to return. After the opening meeting disaster it appears lessons have not been learned, we have a fantastic new stadium, best track in the country, and a team top of the league. Yet still past mistakes are revisited, the crowd was woeful anyway and ive no doubt many yet again will have been alienated. After all the trials and tribulations of delivering this stadium all that good work is being undone by very poor management. I posted a couple of seasons ago i believed this promotion would deliver this facility but would not have the ability to run it to its full potential. What i witnessed tonight sadly does not make me change my mind. I feel the promotion are out of their depth, this is a great oppertunity to launch the club into a new golden era and that is being squandered. Imagine the Facenna brothers or Matt Ford for example having a stadium like this in a major city, the public awareness and the complete running of the club would be far more professional. You only get one oppertunity to create a good first impression, that was lost at the grand opening, tonight did nothing to convince me the promotion are learning from their mistakes.

Good honest post. I was a neutral here tonight after being exiled from my home track, and was excited about seeing the racing here. However, I won't be back and questionable if I'll be back at any uk race track!!

[Shale Searcher 1,264]

Trouble is, the sport now is professionally disproportionate...

 

Professional riders. Well paid, not to other sports levels, but we'll paid..

 

But, everyone else involved, bar the referee, and possibly the promotor/s who can make a little money, or not a loss, are about the only people who get paid!! (Some track curators get paid as well) but everyone else just about is a volunteer!!!!!

 

Spectators expect it to be run professionally..

 

And it's not.. Perhaps the trackman, didn't get to the track until 7pm? He may well have a full-time job, as most other volunteers who make speedway happen..

 

And there is one of the problems...

 

The top football/cricket/rugby/F1/etc at least have fully paid, full-time groundsman, and key staff, speedway does not, because there's not enough money, because not enough spectators, because it's a shambles most of the time, because there's not enough paid key staff, because there's not enough money.......

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Do you see where I'm coming from??

[Phil The Ace 2,860]

Remember we have new track men after colin retired at wold cup. So it's a learning curve for them. Hopefully they have learnt from there mistake. All though they dIiddnt want to blade it but was made to by some riders. Especially the men in black guys

[A ORLOV 8,628]

Remember we have new track men after colin retired at wold cup. So it's a learning curve for them. Hopefully they have learnt from there mistake. All though they dIiddnt want to blade it but was made to by some riders. Especially the men in black guys

That may well be the case but what needs to be learnt is that probably some fans from away clubs will not take the risk in travelling to Belle Vue if there is the slightest chance of weather issues.

Too often we hear the comment lessons will be learnt but they are not and the mistakes keep happening because of the lack of professionalism and guidance from the people running the operation.

[Phil The Ace 2,860]

That may well be the case but what needs to be learnt is that probably some fans from away clubs will not take the risk in travelling to Belle Vue if there is the slightest chance of weather issues.

Too often we hear the comment lessons will be learnt but they are not and the mistakes keep happening because of the lack of professionalism and guidance from the people running the operation.

No I agree. Kings Lynn and us have really f***ed up in the last month or 2. Not helping the sport 1 bit. Away fans won't bother as u say. But not just that. Home fans will stay away also and that's what pays the bills home fans

[hyderd 1,216]

maybe this, maybe that, maybe the other. The simple fact is the forecast was dry from 1600 with wall to wall sunshine from 1700 and dry for the rest of the evening. Blade it at 1630 the sun comes out at 1700 and drys the track creating a very slick dust bowl of a track, or leave it and let mother nature dry it. whatever they do the promotion were in a no win situation and by 2030 it was pi**ing it down again anyway. The only thing that would've saved this meeting is not there yet,why??????????

[Aces51 2,778]

When I arrived in the stadium at about 6.40 I was surprised that the track had not been bladed. You could see it was smooth with plenty of shale down but although there was no standing water I could see but the top surface was saturated. They sent out the men in black, who were down to race in the second half and the announcer said it was to see if they would turn over the top surface and help improve the conditions, pretty much as we often see after a few races on rain affected tracks. After their three races it was plain to see that riders were making their views known at the pit gate and it was then that the new track curator brought out the blader. It was obvious that it was not going to work. The shale was so wet that it was collecting in clumps which the tractor and grader could not break down.

 

On a number of occasions this year the track has shown that the drainage is so good that the track can survive heavy rain. It seems that the promotion thought the drains would again do their job this time but they got it wrong and have apologised.

 

Maybe we should remember that with a new track it's a learning curve. Nobody knew just how much water the drains could cope with given a few hours of dry weather before match time. There was good reason from the experence to date to believe the drains would have coped but they didn't. They now have a better idea of their limitations but there are so many variables, the volume of water absorbed, the temperature, wind speed that it will never be an exact science.

 

I certainly have sympathy for the new track curator. He can't at the moment know how the track will react to the various weather permutations and it will take time to gain that experience.

 

I have no idea what is happening with track covers. Various rumours, delay because track dimensions had to be checked again after the track alterations, manufacturers got the measurements wrong and not commercially viable because number of postponements will be few because of the drainage. I've no idea what the real story is and the management need to let us know.

 

It is never good when matches are postponed with fans in the stadium. Fortunately, given what happened, it was a poor crowd, although reading reports on here and elsewhere seems to have contained an unusually high proportion of newbies. If true, that is doubly unfortunate. I didn't meet any of them but if I had would have explained why I thought it had happened and that the NSS has proved on a number of occasions that it is better able to get meetings on than most tracks in the UK, so certainly worth another visit.

[waiheke1 4,295]

http://www.bellevueaces.co/newsitem.aspx?id=1863

 

Apology from Belle Vue website.

Tickets can used whenever or a full refund.

A pretty poor apology tbh. Blaming have it all on the weather...

I can never understand why an instant refund cannot be given. If I paid by card online I would just chargeback, but if I habded over £20 an hour earlier I would expect the money to be returned without the hassle of posting it in.

 

 

Imagine the policy is there to help cash flow management, given clubs will have incurred costs. I'd also think it's possibly not legal to refuse to refund cash if someone requests it?

[Little Thumper 528]

Reading all the posts on this unfortunate affair, it appears that a combination of circumstances produced this unacceptable outcome.

As always in these situations, I feel sympathy for the visiting fans who will be considerably out of pocket and are far less likely to travel to away meetings in the future.

Surely, the decision to undertake fundamental track work close to the start of a meeting should not be made by sundry riders and the bloke on the tractor.

Is there not a Clerk of the Course who along with the meeting referee would decide the optimum course of action?

Clearly, if the C of C was a former rider then there would be a greater likelihood of a good decision being made?

Allowing spectators into a stadium to watch nothing more than bods operating sundry machinery is pretty unforgivable particularly when they are not immediately and fully refunded as they trudge back to the car park.

Anybody can c*ck up once, but this is getting a bit farcical.

[bellevueace 913]

So who should have bought the basket case that was Belle Vue at the dog track off Tony Mole?

 

That has no bearing on the current mis management, as i said i had no doubt they would deliver the stadium but would not have the experiance to run it to its full potential. Sadly that is being bourne out.

[BWitcher 12,453]

 

 

 

Remarkably last night appears to have been almost a carbon copy of two other late postponements, the first was at Kings Lynn in April and the second was at err.. Kings Lynn in July! Talk about not learning from your mistakes.

 

 

Cut out most of your utter guff.

 

As usual you are the ONLY person on the thread still trying to defend and deflect blame.

 

The situation was very, very different and far from a 'carbon copy' of the Kings Lynn meeting against Swindon in July. In that meeting the rain arrived right before the meeting was due to start, after the paying public were in the stadium.

 

In this case the rain had gone by 16:00 and Belle Vue had ample time to blade the track and get it ready.

 

To quote yourself, stop lying.