Forums

You can have Jamie ethrington 😜

If any Poole fans want to see proper speedway with lots of passing look out for replays / highlights of the comets meeting today 😀🔵⚪🏁

Well that was a pleasing result, was expecting the comets to lose at home, with the published team, but 6 of the guys stood up to be counted, fantastic racing by both sides at times, and the crowd was a lot better than expected after last nites result. Well done to the Comets this is how speedway should be. 🔵⚪🏁😀 Can we swap cluff for ethrington please Edinburgh??

Are you mad? 

That was a good interview for a job when Monarchs dump him.

From Ben Barker   Firstly, I want to make it absolutely clear that I have no problem with the Speedway Control Bureau and Auto Cycle Union. They have done nothing untoward. In the close season, the riders were told they had to pay an extra £28 for their ACU licence. That was, we were told, to cover for an extra insurance policy. From the research I have done, this is what I believe has happened. When that was suggested by the ACU, BSPL chairman Rob Godfrey decided the riders don’t need to be insured by the clubs. Therefore it saved the clubs a load of money per season. I’m not sure of the exact amount, but around £4,000 per club. When this issue was first raised by me at Poole on Good Friday, Mr Godfrey stated in Speedway Star on April 11 that “Ben Barker has caused a panic for nothing. The insurance policy has not been withdrawn, it has been replaced”. Subsequently, it’s been clear that ACU insurance was inferior to the old Race Insurance. This had led to the clubs covering their own riders to quell any fears, Ipswich and Redcar have announced this publicly, while a couple of other clubs have done so privately. Just over a week ago, the BSPL issued a new insurance policy which is inferior to the previous Race Insurance we had with the BSPL. The old cover for an injured rider was £225 a week, 14-day excess period and up to 52 weeks of payments. The new cover is now £150 a week, 14-day excess period and only up to 26 weeks of payments. It is nowhere near good enough to what we had previously. But it was a clear admission of wrongdoing by the BSPL that they had to re-issue a new insurance despite claiming I had caused “panic for nothing”. That wasn’t true. There has been no apology or explanation to how the season was started with riders not having appropriate insurance. Four riders were injured during that period; Niels-Kristian Iversen, Charles Wright, Tobias Thomsen and Vinnie Foord. That is clear negligence from the BSPL. That needs to be explained and who made those decisions which have cost the injured riders dearly. We need transparency about the people who made the decisions and whether we need changes in the people running the BSPL. Someone has to take responsibility for the mistakes that have been made. This is such a serious issue. The riders’ welfare has been overlooked in a terrible way. There are even more serious issues regarding this insurance issue. I will go into them at a later point. If it get 1000 likes 500 shares ill give a £50 voucher of the winners choice