Cardiff 2022

[iainb 5,022]

1 minute ago, HenryW said:

Parken in Copenhagen and Friends Arena in Stockholm also had roofs.

Of course... and I went to Parken twice, should have noticed the roof 

[Humphrey Appleby 13,960]

29 minutes ago, iainb said:

It has great transport links and there's quite a big shopping mall adjacent to the site... and there's also the Olympic Park

Wembley also has good transport links, and there's quite a few hotels, restaurants and bars on-site now, as well as several shopping malls nearby.

I admittedly haven't been for about 3 years, but the Olympic Park didn't have a lot in it from memory. And a fair bit of it was already looking unkempt and somewhat rundown. 

29 minutes ago, iainb said:

"It's also why there's never been an athletics event held there." erm... the 2012 Olympics and:

Although West Ham United are the primary tenants, the stadium's operators arrange many other events to take place there.

Erm, I was talking about Wembley. 

However, if a GP was to be held in London it wouldn't be at Wembley and far more likely to be in the Olympic Stadium. 

[iainb 5,022]

4 minutes ago, Humphrey Appleby said:

Wembley also has good transport links, and there's quite a few hotels, restaurants and bars on-site now, as well as several shopping malls nearby.

I admittedly haven't been for about 3 years, but the Olympic Park didn't have a lot in it from memory. And a fair bit of it was already looking unkempt and somewhat rundown. 

Erm, I was talking about Wembley. 

However, if a GP was to be held in London it wouldn't be at Wembley and far more likely to be in the Olympic Stadium. 

you could have said... I'm not a mind reader 

Let's face it there's not going to be a GP in London while they can't even get 20,000 in at Cardiff. The crowds have looked down at all the GP's over the last few years (with the exception of Warsaw), we've lost the big stadium Danish & Swedish events, the Polish ones aren't even playing to full houses and that was before Covid. I think the whole competition is in need of a revamp... are Discovery events the people to do it?

Edited August 19, 2022 by iainb

[Humphrey Appleby 13,960]

12 hours ago, R87 said:

Increasingly baffled as to why so many on here are so desperate to defend their precious Cardiff that they'll rubbish everything about Belle Vue  - 1 of the best things to happen to British Speedway in the last twenty years

Well if Cardiff is only pulling 19,000 then the British GP will soon have to be held at Belle Vue.

Belle Vue is decent for domestic meetings and even smaller international events, but it would be totally a backward step to move the premier event there whilst somewhere like Cardiff is still financially viable. I hold no candle for Cardiff which I don't think is especially convenient to reach and has appalling overpriced accommodation, but neither do I think moving the GP to a small venue in a less than salubrious suburb of Manchester is really where speedway wants to be going, no matter how good the track. 

I was quite critical of the former SGP promoters who didn't particularly move the series forward in 22 years, but I don't think trying to take some GPs to premier stadiums in city centre locations was really the wrong thing to be doing. In the case of the GPs it isn't just about the racing but the annual experience - plenty of World Finals had poor racing - and having experienced the charms of Pocking, it wouldn't attract me back for that sort of event. 

[iainb 5,022]

1 minute ago, Humphrey Appleby said:

I was quite critical of the former SGP promoters who didn't particularly move the series forward in 22 years, but I don't think trying to take some GPs to premier stadiums in city centre locations was really the wrong thing to be doing. In the case of the GPs it isn't just about the racing but the annual experience - plenty of World Finals had poor racing - and having experienced the charms of Pocking, it wouldn't attract me back for that sort of event. 

If you think the last lot didn't move the series forward... you must love the new lot!

[iainb 5,022]

20 hours ago, Humphrey Appleby said:

Visit Wales no longer seems to be listed as a sponsor

And they're not the only advertising signs that have gone missing. You look back over previous years and there were some pretty big name sponsors, global corporates, I seem to remember Fiat, Coca-Cola, Monster Energy. Look at what's there now: some dodgy bitcoin merchants, a dodgy tyre supplier and some polish haulage company.. Eddie Stobartski

The SGP series is currently at the lowest ebb it's ever been imo

[racers and royals 8,736]

1 minute ago, iainb said:

And they're not the only advertising signs that have gone missing. You look back over previous years and there were some pretty big name sponsors, global corporates, I seem to remember Fiat, Coca-Cola, Monster Energy. Look at what's there now: some dodgy bitcoin merchants, a dodgy tyre supplier and some polish haulage company.. Eddie Stobartski

The SGP series is currently at the lowest ebb it's ever been imo

Is that apart from DSE increasing the prize money considerably.  They have given  us continual individual pit shots of riders picking their nose and spitting 

[iainb 5,022]

Just now, racers and royals said:

Is that apart from DSE increasing the prize money considerably.  They have given  us continual individual pit shots of riders picking their nose and spitting 

Tbh, not sure what the prize money is, if that's true, has it improved the show?

For me the pit layout is about the only improvement DSE have made. At the end of the BSI/IMG era the riders were hidden away in their pit bays... It always used to give me a laugh watch Nicki Pedersen blow his nose into a paper towel and then run it through his hair 

[Humphrey Appleby 13,960]

8 minutes ago, iainb said:

Let's face it there's not going to be a GP in London while they can't even get 20,000 in at Cardiff. The crowds have looked down at all the GP's over the last few years (with the exception of Warsaw), we've lost the big stadium Danish & Swedish events, the Polish ones aren't even playing to full houses and that was before Covid. I think the whole competition is in need of a revamp... are Discovery events the people to do it?

I got the impression that IMG largely gave up on the SGP at some point, and just went through the motions to fulfil their necessary contractual obligations. They may have started out with some bigger ambitions at some point, but a combination of poor promotion, poor choice of location, declining interest in speedway in general, competing interests of the Polish Leagues in particular, exhausting the pool of local promoters willing to 'do a wedge', and other distractions (e.g. bidding to run the London Olympic Stadium that cost them a fortune) meant these ambitions could never be fulfilled. Having said that, the SGP organisers also seemed to be fairly amateurish in their approach, so maybe it was cause-and-effect.

Discovery is a much bigger organisation than IMG with far more money, so perhaps they can better speculate to accumulate for a while and/or leverage better sponsorship and media deals. However, apparently outsourcing the British GP to the former promoters and attracting the lowest crowds possibly ever doesn't seem like a great start.

I do think speedway is a hard sell for anyone though. It has a very limited geographical base, poor spectator demographics, gets limited mainstream media coverage, and has high overheads on top of that. 

 

[FAST GATER 853]

The roof if nothing else will make it hard to move the GP from Cardiff I would favour Odsal myself for number of reasons ,the  location is against it practical /track issues could be resolved if the powers that be were to  choose to do so .

Edited August 19, 2022 by FAST GATER

[SPEEDY69 1,260]

Odsal was a great venue but I think the roof is such a big ticket item in Cardiff's favour -  maybe a 100m track would fit into the Centre Court at Wimbledon 

[TINYS 292]

20 minutes ago, SPEEDY69 said:

Odsal was a great venue but I think the roof is such a big ticket item in Cardiff's favour -  maybe a 100m track would fit into the Centre Court at Wimbledon 

Better idea would be to get rid of all them tennis courts and build a track.

[Humphrey Appleby 13,960]

4 hours ago, FAST GATER said:

The roof if nothing else will make it hard to move the GP from Cardiff I would favour Odsal myself for number of reasons ,the  location is against it practical /track issues could be resolved if the powers that be were to  choose to do so .

Odsal got something like 17,000 for its last World Final, and I don't think it was even full (although close). The previous year, the Munich Olympic Stadium - whilst the track was rubbish - managed to pull 50-odd thousand, despite Germany not really being a major speedway nation. Cardiff even in its first year got something like 30-35k. 

I think the moral of the story is that small provincial stadiums just don't pull the crowds.

[customhouseregular 1,651]

5 hours ago, HenryW said:

Parken in Copenhagen and Friends Arena in Stockholm also had roofs.

So the vast majority of stadia were roofless, which validated my point.

[Humphrey Appleby 13,960]

21 minutes ago, customhouseregular said:

So the vast majority of stadia were roofless, which validated my point.

Well not really. The issue is GPs that have the expense of building temporary tracks. 

Since the SGP started, I count just 6 stadiums where temporary tracks were installed and there wasn't a roof. Berlin and Sydney were used once, and the Stockholm Olympic Stadium was used 3 times back in the early days.

The other stadiums were Gothenburg (9), Horsens (4) and Tampere (2) - none of which are still used. So a total of 20 GPs.

By my count, 7 roofed stadiums have been used - Cardiff (20), Warsaw (5), Stockholm Friends Arena (5), Copenhagen (12), Melbourne (3), Hamar (3) and Gelsenkirchen (2). So a total of 50 GPs.