Humphrey Appleby

I think in fairness, the sport would also not exist without the promoters keeping it alive with their money and time. We can shake our heads some of the decisions, but the COVID situation is really been close to terminal for what was already a sport needing critical care.

An AGM used to legally be required for a limited company (although I believe the BSPA was not a limited company until quite recently), but is no longer required for private limited companies.

IMO, in team racing you should only get a point for each opposition rider you're placed ahead of. Thus a 5-1 would be 4-0, a 4-2 would be 3-1 and a 3-3 would be a 2-2. It would put paid to the nonsense of paid points, and teams still getting a point for finishing last. 3-2-1-0 is fine for individual meetings.

Maybe the safety fence needs to come in for whatever reason, and that would otherwise make the track too narrow?

I think the argument was that being excluded for tape touching doesn't benefit the team, unlike (say) laying down a bike during a race when on a heat disadvantage. The reserve replacement will usually not be better, and they could have been put in the race anyway if the team had really wanted to gain a tactical advantage. Frankly though, using potentially unreliable tapes to detect a false start is pretty old fashioned anyway. Just get rid of the tapes and use a laser beam to detect it.

A tapes exclusion counts as a ride for average purposes, but not for the purpose of calculating minimum rides unless the rider is not replaced.

Even Oxford fans don't want Swindon to close, but you have to be a realist where Gaming International are concerned.

They would presumably have to be affiliated to the ACU first. There are a couple of Nora clubs listed as ACU-affiliated - Nora Sport and Nora-MX but these have different websites to NORA92.

I think it fairness, even in sports that are entirely team oriented like football, players have long had individual sponsorships. It's a difficult one, because if you're turning out in a rusty old white van then that doesn't look good either from a sponsorship perspective or convey a professional image of the sport. I suspect sponsors also expect to get some advertisement on the van and kit as well. Of course you have to question whether any of this is actually benefitting the sport, but I'd not think £20k is an especially high amount when you break it down.

Whilst agreeing that a meeting needs to be more than a 15-heat match, I think the problem with speedway compared to other sports is that it's a 'weekly' sport that doesn't always take place at weekends. To fill out the meeting in the manner above, you're going to need to rely on amateur riders - probably even relying on them to pay their own way to the tracks, and is that going to be viable all season? It might work at the Friday, Saturday and Sunday tracks, but I think it's a tougher ask for amateurs to be expected to turn out midweek on a regular basis. I also think competitions needs to have context - having a few scratch races is okay for an amateur meeting where only friends and family turn up, but I'm not sure will keep the interest of a paying public.

Who'd wish to humiliate themselves?

Although it could be argued that never managed to attract the same media coverage or anything like the sponsors that some other sports did. That's did for it in the end, when the crowds started dropping away.

Coal fired power stations also have a limited lifespan, require expensive maintenance and are certainly not carbon neutral. It also requires mining that's damaging to both the environment and human health. I'm actually somewhat sceptical about global warming in the sense of its underlying causes, and don't particularly think it'll be the disaster it's made out to be, But that doesn't change the fact that burning fossil fuels also impacts local air quality, causes respiratory diseases, and that you can reduce the amount you're using in favour of cleaner energy sources and more efficient products. Few would pretend that wind or solar are the whole or even most of the answer, and I'd have long gone down the nuclear path for always-on energy production. But it can go some of the way, and I don't think it's completely impractical that speedway could go completely electric tomorrow and charge up its bikes from these sources. But you can argue that manufacturing would have moved abroad anyway, and at some point the environmental issues will hit China as well. I don't see that generating 25% of the UK's energy through wind and solar has caused anyone to be poorer, nor lowered environmental standards. The elephant in the room is that purely electric cars are just not up to the job beyond driving around town, but hydrogen fuel cells may fill that gap is there's sufficient incentive for manufactures and the buying public.

Electric vehicles for road use are not yet entirely practical due to lack of range, the demand of lithium, and the battery disposal problem. But I’d think speedway would be well suited to it, and the battery issue would be almost insignificant with what, maybe under 2000 speedway motors in the whole world? And where do old speedway engines currently go to die?

It’s a matter of perception. If you’d only ever known quiet e-formulas, you wouldn’t miss the noise or smell. To use the analogy of heritage railways, I don’t miss the soot, smoke and burning coal smell because I always travelled on electrified railways for as long as I can remember. I don’t particularly like the smell of coal either.

Ultimately, I don't really see the mileage in basically just repeating the Saturday event on a Sunday with the same riders. Other motorsports will generally have practice, qualifying and different types of race (if not different classes) on different days. Plus as others have said, you can usually camp overnight and not pay the ridiculous Cardiff hotel rates. I know it seems to work with ice racing, but I think it's telling that the Amsterdam experiment was never really repeated in speedway.

Just add a speaker connected to an iPod with speedway exhaust sounds, as well as a smell generator that drips Castrol R into some sort of heated pipe.

I think I saw that they're trying to re-open the old Central Line extension to Ongar as a 'heritage' electric railway.

It doesn't really matter what the rights and wrongs are. Noisy combustion engines using carbon-based fuel are going to get outlawed sooner or later, regardless of whether there a few or many. I'd think things like heritage railways are also going to come under scrutiny, even if they can still get hold of coal. There's probably going to be a market for old London Underground trains in future.. Again, it doesn't really matter whether they're justified or not - complain they will and use every spurious argument. It will be harder to counter the noise argument if much quieter engines are available.

The Dutch F1 GP was nearly prevented from happening because of a legal challenge on environmental grounds, and this sort of thing is only going to increase as the world moves to electric vehicles. Whether traditionalists like it or not, speedway is going to have to move to electric if it's still around in 10 years time, and possibly even before. I'd have thought speedway with its short races would be well suited to electric propulsion, and might even bring down the costs of engines and expensive tuners.

For some reason, multi-day events in speedway never seem to have been popular. Not really understood why as it seems to work in other motorsports, and indeed ice speedway, but it is what it is.

I think that horse has bolted now, and the British leagues just need to try and move forward in a financial sustainable manner without trying to accommodate the multiple International demands they derive no benefit from. If that means teams essentially being made-up of juniors but who're able to turn up every Friday or Saturday, then that's what needs to happen.

Not sure that such a competition would attract plenty of spectators or TV deals. It didn't when the World Championship featuring all the top riders was a knockout competition, and I'm not sure what the interest would be in European/Nordic/Overseas meetings held at a neutral venue without the top riders. I'd think such an event would depend very heavily on spectators to pay its way, and having so many meetings at one venue (or even one country) in such a short time would have high costs and wouldn't attract enough local interest quite aside from the track preparation demands. The SWC held in one venue/country didn't really pull the fans, so I'm not convinced this would be goer financial or logistically. The bottom line too, is that these qualifying meetings are distributed around Europe to give different countries a chance of staging a 'World Championship' event. It probably also helps to spread the financial risk as well. Fundamentally, I think it's daft to have a knockout competition deciding the places in a GP series, and particularly with so few SGP places on offer. As I said, I'd rather have all or most of the riders qualify from some sort of season-long competition linked to the major professional leagues, with perhaps a qualification path (e.g. via the European Championship) for riders outside of those leagues.

The proliferation of FIM and UEM competitions over the past few years is really to raise the status of meetings in the smaller speedway countries. The likes of Hungary probably find it hard to attract semi-decent line-ups to their domestic meetings, so sticking a World or European Championship title on it - whether U19 or otherwise - not only raises the apparent profile of those meetings, but they probably also get away with paying far less than they'd otherwise need to be paying to get a similar line-up. That was of course, one of the rationales of the SGP to give more countries more high profile meetings on a regular basis. Again, that major professional leagues have allowed this to happen is very poor, although weekend speedway probably doesn't really impact Poland and Sweden (or Denmark) in quite the same way other than their riders possibly getting injured. I suppose a big loser is longtrack which used to be able to pull the top speedway riders to their Sunday meetings, but the rise of the Polish leagues started that trend anyway. The three or four professional speedway leagues should have taken control of the FIM competitions years ago, whether still under the FIM banner or under a new body. Bernie Ecclestone and the F1 teams did that years ago, and whilst they nominally respect the FIA as the sanctioning body and pay licensing fees, the F1 participants and their venture capital partners fundamentally organise and run the competitions for their own benefit. Yes, the SGP, SWC and SON competitions could be condensed to run on less weekends, but probably television wants regular meetings throughput the season. The UEM speedway competitions should have no place at all in the calendar, except perhaps as a lower tier competition for riders not competing in the main professional leagues. Speedway is primarily a European-based sport anyway, so it's absolutely ridiculous to have these duplications that are effectively competing with each other for riders and sponsors. That the FIM allowed the UEM to do this was another fiasco. I'd possibly even abolish SGP qualifiers as we know it, and select riders based on their averages or some sort of season-long 'second-half' qualification competition in the main professional leagues. You might want to have some qualifying events for riders who don't ride in these competitions to gain 'ranking points' or maybe a place or two in the SGP, and these could be staged in the smaller speedway nations. But I find it absurd that a GP competition uses a knockout format to determine places in the competition. When it comes down to, it's really only the British leagues that are hugely affected by the FIM calendar, but that a (once) major speedway league providing employment to most professional riders in the world allowed its position to be undermined so much, shows very poor political lobbying. No doubt many of the British promoters were of the ilk that 'that they need us more than we need them', 'pull up the drawbridge' and even 'Britannia Rules the Waves', but in the end were totally outmanoeuvred by those in the FIM and private promoters. But they might have persuaded the other professional leagues to their way of thinking by pointing out the potential amounts of money going to the FIM and out of the sport to a private promoter with little or no skin in the domestic speedway game. A total lack of vision combined with the sticking of heads in the sand...

In the early years, GP 'stars' were possibly thought of as a drawcard as British fans expected to see 'the best riders in the world'. And quite possibly promoters would have seen decreased crowds without them, so it's understandable why they got sucked in. However, history has shown that the inclusion of GP riders did little or nothing to improve crowds or revenues, or ultimately justify the costs that were incurred. That's not the fault of the GP riders who are largely only interested in making the best living they can whilst they can, nor indeed can you blame them for having their cake and eating it with respect to riding in the SGP, if that's what British promoters put on their plates. But at the end of the day, they merely hastened the downward spiral of a sport that had already started on the downward spiral. As I said, the moment the SGP cat was allowed to be let out of the bag, the British leagues had stuffed themselves. A GP series was inevitable in the modern world, just as similar disruptive influences like the IPL and Big Bash were inevitable in cricket, but if you're the incumbent running the sport then at least make sure you're part of the bandwagon and get your cut from it...