E I Addio

Every post you have made has been answered by a variety of posters, mostly with first hand experience and a technical background explaining why your ideas are not practical. You have rejected those comments with fanciful suggestions with no factual basis. You now reckon that clubs could could find around £50k for 14 new engines by not paying so much in contracts. So perhaps you can back this up with a few facts. How much do clubs pay in contracts now and how much of a reduction would riders accept to make this £50k saving? On your idea of a pool of engines riders don't know which engines they are going to get and therefore how much money they will make. Unless you can show us your costings it looks like a pie in the sky argument.

The most popular engine in this country is GM. GM do not sell ready to race engines. They have to be sent to a tuner to assemble in race able condition. You woukd need several different tuners to build them for a whole league, and no two hand built engines would be quite the same. That is your first problem. To supply 7 man team with 2 engines per rider would cost at least £50k. Where would cash strapped clubs find that sort of capital outlay? That is the tile already so no saving there.

Yeah , but look at the bites it got me from the Bluetints! FWIW, cant read too much into what anyone does in a relatively unimportant match when they are still testing and sorting engines, especially if the weather is still cold. I will be astonished though if KK rides like a No 1for the whole season. He seems to have good spells at times but can't usually keep it going off a whole season.

To summarise Peter Johns comments to their basics he is saying that relative to other motor sports Speedwáy is not that expensive and a lot of the trouble is because people don't know how to look after them properly. He says the biggest single thing is not filling them with water when pressure washing and the next most important thing is keeping dirt out of the engine when making adjustments during a meeting. This is in line with my own observstions. The first rule of engineering is to keep your workplace clean, yet I see many junior riders and their so called mechanics working in all kinds of mess. Some of them never learn and the reason they never learn is that their is no one to teach them. Young riders should be taught the basics from day one. Peter Johns backs up what he says by pointing out that engines he built for Chris Holder and Tai Woofinden 4 or 5 years ago are still in use. It is a myth that riders need new engines every year yet some spend a fortune on them . The other thing is learning about ignitions and getting them right. Sometimes a minor ignition fault can be difficult to trace and riders spend a lot of money replacing other things without finding the real cause of the problem. Sealed engines won't cure lack of technical knowledge. Proper. Technical education(and riders that can be bothered to learn ) will . That IMO is where the real problem lies.

You couldn't get seven engines exactly the same, and even if you could riders are different weights and sizes , with different riding styles and need engines set up in different ways. You really should read the Peter Johns interview in SS . It is an eye opener.

Because methanol allows a higher compression ratio. Grass track bikes also use methanol because , like Speedwáy it is a sprint and needs a lot of power in a short burst. They would seem quite boringly slow on petrol

....and Agent Kasprzak is an asset of ?

Will there be an additional charge for the car park ?

You can't do anything regardless of purse strings whatever business you are running, whether it is Speedwáy club or a corner shop. Once your outgoings exceed your income it is a recipe for going out if business, unless you have a sponsor with very deep pockets, it's as simple as that. It's obvious that crowd levels took a big hit last season due to an inordinate number of guests who didn't perform. For example Lindgren, Roo-boy and Doyle only scored about 16 points in total between them in three meetings guesting at No 1,apart from being totally shafted on the fast track with having to get NL riders covering for the injured Ashley Birks . The fans won't take much more of that.The club clearly have to rebuild financially from a poor season. Stuart Douglas, to be fair, has been straight with the fans from Day One in saying he wants to balance the books as far as possible. Fair enough, we don't want the club to go the way of Peterborough and Eastbourne with thousands being poured in without results. That is the sort of shoestring that most Speedwáy clubs have to run on these days whatever league they are in, and I use the word shoestring in a relative sense because we are talking about the risk of losing tens of thousands of pounds not a few pence. Such is the precarious state of Speedwáy in the 21st century.

Yes, and he also added "But unfortunately the purse strings wouldn't quite stretch to that" , a fact you chose to omit in your previous attempt at stirring. That throws a totally different perspective on it. One might as well say they could have had Bjarne and Emil Sayfutinov if the purse strings would have stretched to it. Interesting that Bjarne doesn't have another team place over here though. Has Matt priced him out of the market we wonder ?

A grass track racer. Half the Ipswich team of that era, notably John Louis, Mike Lanham and Tony Davey had been scramblers or grass trackers before turning to the shale and were not coming into Speedwáy cold. Loads came up from the grass in that era . Michael Lees dad was pretty good scrambler so he was another one that pretty much grew up with off road riding But there are still no names, of who they were. Anyway the discussion is getting a bit futile now, as these things often do when other people jump in and start name dropping names without reading the thread properly. The fundamental point that we are agreed on is that the great days of the past are largely a matter of perception, and although there were some great races in the past there were plenty of others strung out for four laps, it's just that we forget about those.

The point that I said was an exagerration was that a rider could turn up at a training school and be in the top fight within "within weeks" . Kelvin was at the Hackney training school for a whole winter i.e months not weeks, but in addition Martin Tatum had been a pretty good grass track racer before that so I am 90 % certain Kelvin had had some time on a grasser before that.

The point of contention was the assertion that "numerous" riders went from training school to riding " at the highest level" within a few weeks. Clearly some went into a team of some kind in a fairly short space of time, not necessarily top level.

rr Your comment was that there have been "numerous" examples in backtrack magazine. "Numerous " in most people's language means many, a lot, or more than just a few. Aces 51 who had more background knowledge than most on here can only think of three riders that went straight into the top flight and all of them had been riding for some time. Your claim is that there are numerous examples of riders turning up at a training school and within weeks were in the top flight but so far we don't have a single name of anyone who did, let alone numerous examples. There might be several examples of some that went into the lower leagues within weeks of sitting on an bike but I doubt if there are numerous examples of riders going straight into the top flight from training school. I think we all agree that racing was better when we were young whenever that was and the riders we grew up watching, whoever they were, were the best.

It happened occasionally but it is a wild exaggeration to say, in your words, "you could just show up at a training school and within weeks you're in a team at the highest level!" There is far more to it than just showing up. Riders who came into teams very quickly were and still are the exceptions rather than the rule. Some got into lower leagues fairly quickly but even those were exceptionally talented riders who went to the top. Most, like Collins or Simmons had already ridden grass track or had previous experience of some kind, and were really the equivalent of modern day riders like Robert Lambert who went straight into the top league but with previous experience. Lewis Bridger is another example of a modern day rider that went into the top league at a very young age. On the other hand Ivan Mauger could not hold down a regular team spot at Wimbledon when he first came over and eventually had to drop down to the Provincial League to hone his skills before riding at the highest level. The difference between today and the past IMO is that a lot of second strings are much better than they used to be and riders who don't perform usually get sacked a lot quicker than years ago, but overall you have to compare like with like, and it's futile to compare past and present.

To be fair to Lewis he invariably clears the track pretty quickly if he falls, even back in his Eastbourne days. He is not one to stay down hoping for a re-run. Lewis might be a lot of things but I don't think he is a cheat. Now I come to think about it I can't remember him touching the tapes, being warned for rolling at the start, or being excluded for unfair riding.

Nor has Starman according to some of the posts on here................

Not sure if that is a fair comment. From at least the Fundin/ Briggs era and maybe before that, those at the very top laid off the booze, in contrast to the stories we hear these days about some riders getting legless before the GP's. In those days with a wider pool of riders coming into the sport there were far more naturally talented riders coming into the sport. Briggo was the first rider to realise the value of fitness but even he used to say it doesn't necessarily make you a lot better, it just keeps you at the top longer. In the context of Poole today Holder is an obvious talent but I think someone like Davey would in almost any team of any era be pretty much what he is in today's team. Personally I think it's futile to compare eras. You have to compare like with like. Poole are a winning side and definitely on a roll but maybe not for the same reasons that Wembly were in the 50's or Belle Vue in the 70's. They should all be appreciated for what they are and not compared.

I couldnt decide between them . Bjarne is undoubtedly has a very professional set-up but its a good few years since he scored big points at Lakeside and even longer since he actually overtook anyone. He would need to turn the clock back at least 5 or 6 years years to do the sort of job he was being brought in to do. Maybe he could have done it maybe he couldn't , we will never know , but it certainly wasn't guaranteed. Lewis, well, he was in great form and spectacular with it in the last half of 2014, but somehow I don't think he will improve above what he was then. He had managed to correct the flying leg style and we didn't see much of him pulling wheelies at the back ( not that he was at the back much at that time), but the style was very much throttle wide open and hang on, without much finess. Plus he didn't seem to care whether it was his own team or the opposition he was taking to the fence. We' ll see what Kelvin can do with him. I am surprised nobody has mentioned Ed Kennet yet, who I would say is at least equal talent to Lewis. He came to Lakeside with his confidence at a seemingly low ebb after a few unhappy seasons but finished up being voted rider of the year by the fans thanks to his spectacular passes. His confidence still has room to improve. The guy was close to winning the British Final a few years ago and if he can get back to his best it would be great for him , and great for Lakeside. Big question mark over him but I would love to see him back at his full potential.

If he produces his 2010 form with Lakeside you had better start getting on the phone to Kenni Larsen right away.

As it happens, I don't read Twitter either. Someone posted it on the BSF . I do hope that helps. Please digest.

Ah, so once again it's clever ol' Starman, that outwits the rest of us with his pretend stupid comments that fooled us all. (I don't think so)

I am in tears now. The Jerran Hart thread was a classic but Hans Andersen doubling his average is something else. The thing is, we all know that sooner rather than later he'll come out with another one.

Exactly. To be fair, we only have Shovlars paraphrase on that. We don't know quite what though he was trying to express. All things being equal, a team that includes both Bjarne and Lewis is a fair comment but once you throw in the fact that Bjarne will be missing crucial matches it puts a different complexion on it. Kelvin is only the coach, he is not part of the promotional team so is not necessarily going to be considering all the angles particularly as there was very strong feeling amongst the fans last year when there were guests in practically every match.

Not a lot of reason ? After last season nothing is going to hit attendances harder than yet more unnecessary, guests and r/r. A rider signs on the basis of being available for all meetings then suddenly he is not riding in key meetings against the best two teams in the league . In the entertainment business doing something that hits a promoters income is one of the best reasons there is to drop someone.