Stoke Potter

Your mates at the BSPA should make Morton National track Consultant and go round the country fixing the circuits. First one they should do is Stoke, Belle Vue would easily fit in Loomer Rd. Don't worry I'll keep taking the tablets. Reality used to be a friend of mine.

You will not get better Speedway than that Heat 13 anywhere! And still you get people saying the likes of the Wolves track is a good race track. No Comparison. You want to save the sport in this country then you need more tracks like Belle Vue!

They should also go round and acknowledge the fans on a wind-down lap. it's entertainment, acknowledge the fans for god's sake!

Heat 9! What a truly superb race track Belle Vue is!

I have similar misgivings. I was down Poole when Chris Harris was presented with £500 (from memory. It may have been more.) from some riders equipment fund. Does Harris really need it? They would be better off investing it in improving the Speedway infrastructure, i.e. the Poole track, it certainly needs it! Similarly, you can bet Workington Speedway have a far greater need for the money than Bewley actually does. Maybe even Belle Vue's finances are such that it would be a benefit to them. Of course the money would have to be invested in improving the product, something promoters are not particularly known for.

There have been rule changes to deliberately reduce the smell?

With the state of some the tracks I've seen this year, it would actually be difficult to do it worse, even if you only had a knife and fork!

Considering how wet the track was, it stood up well and produced some decent racing. Fricke & Berge pulling some good passes. No track in the country can cope with the rain like B.V. Shame they now all have to trek down the M6 to have a go on the Monmore trick-track!

I sincerely hope they succeed, goes without saying time is running out. I look forward to seeing what comes out. Shame "my" team will be Div3 (or none existent) regardless of structure...

Actually your response implied there were negotiations regarding the situation of Swindon and that is what I was seeking to clarify! As ever, your attitude is awful to potential paying customers and speaks volumes. Fixture chaos? Is that the same fixture chaos caused by your chums at the BSPA I wonder? They'll be struggling to finalise next year's structure if Swindon end up not having anywhere to race.....

What negotiations are taking place and how many years has this been going on? The public are being taken for fools, not for the first time in this sport.

Why can't I comment on another track if, what you assume to be my closest track, currently has a reputation for being poor? You won't find me defending Stoke. However, from the evidence I've seen Somerset is over-rated. It my well be one of the better ones in the country but that is only because most of the rest are so bad. Tatum was raving about it last night and said Somerset is a great track, it has 2 lines! Oh, so just the 2 lines then, round the kerb or round the fence? A decent track has multiple lines, not just the 2, which it didn't actually have last night anyway. The Poole meeting the week before was more entertaining for the neutral and, despite Poole's recent reputation for having tracks problems, Wimborne Rd. was on a par with that surface last night. I went to Somerset way back in the 2000's to watch Stoke for a Division 2 match and came away utterly unimpressed, my opinion was the place was over-rated. Nothing I've seen since has changed my view. Unlike many others it does have the potential to be a top class track but is currently a long way short of Belle Vue, which is THE best track in the country. Add to that we have also the Team Manager essentially admitting to the fact that the track had been doctored! And people wonder why the sport doesn't get a bigger following...

One of the best tracks in the country? Slick, bumpy, and not a lot of passing...

They should start investing in some "fat" shale then! Modern day fans (actually fans of any era) won't like having their view spoilt by getting dust in their eyes, and the fans are more important than the riders, but most people don't realise that. Seems obvious that last winter's attempt to fix the track failed, time for Ford to get his hand in his pocket and do it properly.

Fair point!

Shame it don't get a run out during the meeting!!!

No dust last night? To be fair, they probably couldn't see the dust for all the dust! Do Poole even have a water tanker, pretty sure I've only seen the hose pipe..?

Track's rough and slick, quite an achievement. That said, I thought there was some reasonable racing/passing. Better than last week when I was there.

Coincidence that all those teams dropped out of the big league the same year as the People investigation? To be fair the decline may have been more marked between 85-95.

It was trying to pin-point a time when the decline started I think. The biggest fall in national crowds was likely to be between 1980 - 1990 I feel.

Perfectly correct. To just dismiss the scandal and say it had no impact goes a long way to summing up why the sport is in the state it is. As does Mauger's attitude to the newspaper, if that is indeed what happened. The national newspapers sponsored many events in the 70's - early 80's. Did that stop after the Sunday People investigation? I don't recall many different sponsors beyond the mid 80's apart from Sunbrite and variations thereof.

I'd also throw in the Sunday People race fixing scandal of 1984. In reality the sport has never recovered.

There wasn't massive clouds of dust but it was getting in people's eyes and spoiling the viewing, therefore it needs water. Why you can't understand that I don't know.

And a ref??

Malilla GP showing what an utter joke it was to call off the Poole meeting!!!