Humphrey Appleby

Unfortunately, I don't think it's that simple. For those promotions renting their stadiums, what else are those stadiums going to be doing to cover their costs? If they lose the income from 10 speedway meetings, will they continue to be viable as going concerns and will they instead decide to sell up for development? For those promotions owning their stadiums, they'll still have fixed costs regardless of how many meetings they stage. So by staging more meetings rather than less, they'll be at least getting some income to amortise some or all of those costs, and may in fact lose less money that way. The number of meetings that get staged is presumably a compromise that suits the cost structure of all the promotions, and without having insight into all the costs, we can't know what the optimal number of meetings is.

Speedway though, has to be one of the few forms of entertainment where the support act takes place after the main event...

If your enterprise is already a marginal existence then an expectedly bad run of weather, England going on a good run in a major football tournament, or any number of other unexpected phenomena (e.g. COVID) will put your cashflow in jeopardy. I suppose a good businessperson should factor some of these things into their calculations, and obviously if you're able to run long enough you'd probably have a good idea of the ups-and-downs. But I doubt many going into speedway have a lot of experience with sports and/or events promotion and get caught out. It's all very well saying that clueless promoters shouldn't really get involved in the sport, but the returns are so abysmal that there's not exactly a long queue of people lining up to take over. So it may well be the case of them or no speedway at all. Of course, few if any sports are run on sensible economic lines anyway. Otherwise successful businesspeople seem to take leave of their senses when getting involved in sport, not least committing to particular costs that they have little say or control over. Begging bowls are commonplace in all sports though, it's just that it's usually done in a more disguised and classy way for the likes of football, cricket and rugby...

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I seem to remember being told it was because many tracks ran a couple of teams in different leagues which had different nicknames.

I believe Skepparna would translate directly to 'The Skippers'. Keeping with the ship related theme, I think Kaparna translated to something like 'The Buccaneers' or 'The Privateers'.

I'd have been more bold and used 'second half' competitions as qualifying for the World Championship and subsequently the SGP. That would have got riders to have taken them seriously...

The odd individual event was fine as a novelty meeting, but I think teams are a better business proposition. Individual riders come-and-go, whereas there's more continuity with teams. Fans tend to follow the same team year-after-year regardless of who's riding, whereas you tend to lose interest in individual competitions when you no longer have a favourite rider in them. I do think one missed opportunity though, was not linking all the open individual meetings of yesteryear into some sort of season-long national competition, possibly leading towards a Riders' Championship or something.

Most, if not all speedway promotions have too small a revenue to have to file detailed accounts at Companies House, so all you're effectively seeing is a balance sheet at a given moment in time which often doesn't align with the speedway season either. It really doesn't tell you much about their profitability or otherwise. Before the threshold was increased some years ago, some speedway promotions did have to file more detailed accounts and it was quite interesting what was claimed as expenses sometimes. There was undoubtedly cash-in-hand stuff going on as well, so apparent losses may not always be what are claimed, and are possibly written off against taxes elsewhere. But it doesn't take a genius to work out from the attendances and limited other sources of revenues that speedway brings in, that it isn't a money spinner.

Well it entirely depends on what your outgoings are. If your outgoings are close to, or exceed your revenue, then survival is an achievement. I'm sure riders would generally also prefer more regular higher wages than an occasional prize fund when they might be injured and miss out. And 180k spread over 19 meetings is effectively 80 quid a point which is probably less than some would be on anyway. It's not a bad idea and I've had thoughts on similar lines myself, but I feel speedway has gone past the point of tinkering with race formats and novelty competitions. It's the image, presentation, stadiums, value-for-money, clientele and poor media profile that does for it. People actually have to know something is happening before they can be interested it, far less be bothered to turn up...

Thought the 3-year working holiday visa already came in a couple of years ago, and some countries already had age increase to 35. Also didn't think that the regional work necessarily had to be farm work. I knew someone who worked in construction up in Darwin who told me that qualified as well.

That's largely the case already. Nothing much of substance beyond raising the age limits, and just a lot of political headlining I think.

Oz is largely back to normal internally, and with the exception of Melbourne never really had lockdowns to the extent of the UK. The country has had less deaths in total than the UK had in one day earlier this year. Of course, the Australian government claims to have controlled the virus by banning their residents from international travel, and forcing returning residents into hotel quarantine at their own expense. There is some talk that requirement will be lifted towards the end of the year for fully vaccinated residents, but we shall see. Australia was slow off the mark with vaccinations, but I think it's been ramping up quickly and it's closer to 15% of the population now.

No-one finished Event 7? An exclusion for no helmet?

Looks like it. The working holiday visa scheme has existed for years, so this is just upping the age limit from 30 to 35 (probably as an attempt to compensate for the labour shortages caused by Brexit). I believe in the past, Aussies without patriality often used working holiday visas to come and ride speedway, but there was a clampdown on this some years ago. I think a specific T5 or T2 visa with various qualifications is now required.

It's just the law of averages though. I've visited about 80 permanent (i.e. not temporary or one-off) tracks in various countries over the years, and by my reckoning just 30 of those are still operational.

Speedway has such a marginal existence that it would probably have been sensible to simply not run in 2021 either. But as the hospitality industry is now finding out, many workers have moved found other jobs and aren't interested in entertaining the uncertainty any more. Added to that, you can't even find any foreigners to do the job either...

Speedway has been practicing social distancing for quite some time though...

Wasn't there some idea that Odsal was going to become the new 'Wembley' of British Speedway, and that staging elite league speedway in such a venue would pull the crowds? The reality is that speedway thrived in some odd places (e.g. King's Lynn), and failed in some places that should in theory have much bigger catchments.

It's not a dump, but it's not a central city area with amenities from what I've seen.

Why would a track cost any more at Wembley than Cardiff?

Wembley is in Greater London, inside the M25, and on the Underground. How is that not London? You are right that 55k fans at a British GP is fantasy stuff though...

Nonsense. The FA will consider anything if the price is right, which is why umpteen concerts have been held on the pitch there, and why several are scheduled even this year. Speedway can't/won't/doesn't want to pay the asking price. Just be honest about it...

It's too big to realistically put a roof over. The biggest roofed stadium in the world is the Dallas Cowboys Stadium, and that's officially 80,000 although it does have a way of squeezing in another 20,000 by having standing 'party decks' and basically moving the seats together into benches. Wembley is 90,000. The Principality Stadium is actually the second largest roofed stadium in the world. I think the Olympic Stadium would be a far more likely candidate for a British GP. More suitable for putting in a track, and I think has to allow a certain number of non-football events each year. It seems IMG actually bid to run the stadium in the past, so that would have been interesting if they'd been successful.

That's for the Welsh Government to weigh up, but the point is that the likelihood of the British GP going anywhere else is heavily dependent on getting a similar subsidy elsewhere. Not to mention competitive rates for hiring the stadium.

There simply aren't 55k speedway fans in the UK anymore...