Kevin Meynell

I feel that GP teams would take the sport in the wrong direction. GP series in most other sports represent not only the pinnacle of competition, but also the highest technical level. For example, F1 bears little relation to karting (arguably the lowest-level of open-wheeled single seat racing), which is why constructor teams have to exist at the different levels. By contrast, speedway is technically pretty much the same from the BCL to the SGP, and quite frankly that's much of its appeal. If the SGP riders started riding totally different machinery to the riders in league competition, it would end-up losing it's relationship to what the average spectator watches domestically. Sure it might make the SGP participants richer, but it wouldn't be speedway as we know it. This said, I think that the BSPA, PZM and SVEMO should collectively run the SGP anyway.

The obvious question is how will you fit-in domestic league matches if the SGP goes to any more rounds? The next question is where is the money coming from to run all these extra rounds? By all accounts, the last Aussie GP lost a fortune, and I'd think some of the current GPs are financially pretty marginal. Ultimately though, unless you have plans to develop a particular market, it's a waste of time and money. The existing speedway markets need a lot of more development before anyone even thinks of trying to expand into other territories. There used to be more riders in it, and it was costing too much. The reduction back to 16 riders was clearly to reduce costs and to improve the changes of hosting a non-European GP. Speedway (at a professional level) is primarily a team sport based around national leagues. The SGP is really only (moderately) successful because the participating riders are linked to domestic teams. Break that link, and the SGP will probably cease to exist.

I've mostly seen them on smaller, tighter tracks like Reading and Oxford. IMO, they work better around places like Coventry.

The sidecar idea has been suggested before. Unfortunately, sidecars aren't a great spectacle on many British tracks because they're generally too small and narrow to accommodate them properly.

I think the point is though, that the NFL and the NBA proves you can make a success out of the most boring sports. Speedway is an inherent exciting sport, but has been badly let down by the people running it over the years.

Indeed, but I think speedway and American football have a lot in common. They both have inherent delays and lots of faffing around between short periods of action. As you say though, American football has managed to turn itself into a widely watched sport (even outside the US), whereas speedway has gone in the opposite direction.

That could be solved by running the heats one-after-another with no delay. It would obviously mean more heats would need to be run, but that's better than contrived gap filling. I recently went to the US National Championship at Costa Mesa, and there they run a swift programme. The meeting went on for nearly 3 hours, but because the racing was almost non-stop (except for a short break to grade the track every 4 heats), the time went quickly.

Certainly, but it would need to be someone with an interest in speedway, and one who also understands that professional sports need to be run somewhat differently to real-world business (i.e. that tracks should not commercially compete with one another, and that weaker teams must be able to compete on somewhat equal terms with the strongest). The problem is, what successful businessman in their right mind would want to get involved with a financial disaster like speedway? Even if I had the time and money to throw away, there's no way I'd put it into the sport whilst most of the current promoters are involved.

I can think of one former promoter who perhaps could do the job, but it probably needs to be an external figure who sees potential in the sport. Even then, they would need to have a good grasp of the sporting and commercial aspects of running a successful sport. IMO, the best supremo in recent times was the late-Pete Rozelle who ran the NFL for much of its existence. I'm not particularly interested in American football, but he did a lot to turn what was essentially a college game into a marketable sport watched around the world. More importantly, he understood the importance of balanced competition, and was instrumental in equal revenue sharing and the principle of allowing weaker teams to strengthen. To me, the term Commissioner implies more power with respect to sporting aspects, but it might just be a difference of nomenclature. A good Commissioner or CEO really needs to be his own man (or woman) and not be too swayed by what the track owners want (which will invariably be different things). Of course, he or she would ultimately need to command support amongst the promoters, but that should come with an improvement in the sport's fortunes. If that doesn't happen, then they're not doing their job properly and should rightly be sacked. The only way for any sport to be run properly, is for club owners to have their say once a year, but leaving the day-to-day decision-making to a Commissioner (or perhaps Commission) which has no links to any club. Of course, the fact the BSPA hasn't implemented this yet, is one of the fundamental reasons why the sport is such a shambles today.

The odds would be on less teams. Even if the sport manages to turn itself around, there will increasing environmental and land use pressures on the venues. I feel the sport at an elite level will eventually come to a crisis where it will no longer be possible to sustain the running costs. That may be the catalyst for a new beginning, with new leagues with a lower cost basis being set-up outside the current framework, or the sport simply disappearing at anything but an amateur level. In all honesty, I think the sport needs a strong visionary commissioner-type figure, who has the support of a handful of promoters that share a similar vision. If that happens, there's no reason why speedway could not return to being the 2nd or 3rd sport in the country, but not with most of the current lot. They simply don't have the speedway infrastructure to bring through more than a handful of riders. Croatia has one track, Ukraine only has two or three, and neither stage more than a handful of meetings each season. Speedway is declining in most parts of the world, and eventually potential riders will concentrate on other motorsports if they can't get regular rides.

Yes, but there's only 5 teams in the DSL so there shouldn't be more than 10 rounds (with each team having two off weeks). Furthermore, according to the fixture list, some matches seem to be held on a Sunday. The foreign-based Danish riders don't ride in every DSL match as it is. The British, Polish and Swedish leagues are of roughly equal standards, but the Danish league is not really of the same importance, even though it does rank fourth.

It might be worth considering holding a series of qualifiers in the guise of traditional open meetings, with the top scorers qualifying for a one-off ELRC Final. An article about this appeared in a Cheetah's Chronicle a couple of years ago... http://www.meynell.com/speedway-articles/belrc.html

John Berry always claimed that it was better when the top riders in each team didn't meet so often. The theory was that it was easier to create superstars that way because they only had one (or at most two) race(s) in which to beat their opponent.

The Danish League only has 10 rounds, so they don't ride every week. In any case, you can't accommodate every league (why not the Czech and German leagues as well), and as only a few BEL riders also ride in the Danish League, I think they'll just have to choose.

This wouldn't really help because riders might have to travel to Britain twice in a week. The two race days need to be adjacent to each other, which really only leaves Wednesday and Thursday. I think that all the current BEL tracks either have Wednesday or Thursday available as a potential race night.

It couldn't happen here though unless they reduced the number of fixtures as there are only 32 weeks in the season. Polish and Swedish teams ride less than half the number of meetings. In addition, a single race night would mean that guests couldn't be used. That in itself might be a good thing, but some sort of replacement system would be needed. I think it would be more feasible to run the BEL on two race nights, which would provide teams with more flexibility and allow more than one match per week.

How would that fit with late-20 and early-30 somethings riding in it?

I'm certainly not old enough to remember, but I understood that Mike Parker introduced some form of rider control in the early-1960s. I believe the points limit dates from circa 1977.

I certainly wasn't around then, but I have read a lot of speedway literature from these periods The general consensus seems to be that a lack of team equalisation resulted in the National League being down to a handful of teams after the post-war boom subsided. Wasn't the need team equalisation one of the driving forces behind the formation of the Provincial League? Many other sports have it in various forms - football is the exception and the clubs are only barely surviving outside the top flight. Of course, the current system of punitive points limits is perhaps not the right way to do it, but some form of team equalisation is absolutely necessary in a sport where the difference between the best and worst is magnified much more than in other sports. I suspect the difference was that they ran speedway as their living, whereas most of today's promoters do it as a hobby of sorts.

Strange.. I could have sworn the best riders rode in the Elite League!

I think using the term in preference to division makes it clearer there's not necessarily any connection between the competitions. However, consistent numbering of the leagues is still more logical than calling them Elite, Premier and Conference.

League 1, League 2 and League 3?

I don't think it's strange. It should easily be possible to run 12 heats per hour (1 heat every 5 minutes). BTW - which town is Pioneer Park in, and do they run speedway all year round?

Well, I don't know how things are run at Belle Vue, but at Oxford there are still indeterminable delays. When I first started going to speedway, the main match was usually over by 21.00, with the second-half/junior match completed by around 21.45, if not 21.30. These days, you're lucky if the main match is finished by 21.30, and that's an improvement over the previously couple of seasons where they regularly struggled to complete 15 heats before 22.00. I realise everyone has different views on this, but I prefer to see swiftly-run meetings. I do not enjoy standing around watching an empty track.

Not so long ago, every meeting had at least 20 programmed heats which were usually completed in under two hours. You could easily run 20 heats in an evening, even allowing for accidents, if you stopped all the messing around and timewasting that's become so prevalent today. The only reason that it takes so long to run 15 heats these days, is because promoters have to disguise the fact that the number of heats had been cut. If they ran at the same pace as in the past, the meeting would be over in an hour-and-quarter.