Piotr Pyszny

Shouty Pearson is a dreadful commentator (as he was a dreadful centre green presenter), but he is one of very few journalists (actually, he probably isn't a qualified journalist) who appear to care about speedway. See where you're coming from, but the likes of former Middlesbrough promoters Ken Knott and Malcolm Wright always wore blazers and ties on race nights. It presented a professional image.

Very sad news indeed. I particularly associate Dave with running the track shop at Cleveland Park, Middlesbrough. Buxton, too. Always happy to chat, before and after meetings. Always full of energy. I later discovered we had another mutual interest: visiting football grounds, and subsequently bumped into him on a fair few of those. One of the nice guys. RIP, Dave.

Run a story like this and one should always give the other party an opportunity to comment. In the same piece - not, at best, a week later. It's 'first day on the job as a journalist' stuff. Makes Speedway Star look and sound like something put together by sixth formers. If Peter Collins really does think a hundred of his mates should get into Belle Vue for nothing, he's seriously lost the plot.

I guess Ivan would have raised much more if the sale had been at a time when speedway was actually popular. Must be a comparatively small pool of buyers nowadays.

Any relation to Dario Franchitti, the Edinburgh-born racing driver, now retired?

Another that sticks out in the memory: I was holidaying in south Wales (as you do) in spring 2002, and drove over to Carmarthen to watch the Dragons' opening meeting (versus King's Lynn's juniors) at the Showground. Big crowd on, and the track wasn't fit for racing. It simply wasn't ready. Nobody could get the bikes sideways on the turns. I watched the meeting in the company of a Newport regular, who described it as a travesty of speedway. Can't imagine any first-timer would have seen much point in returning. Did Carmarthen end their chances, there and then, of making a success of staging speedway in south-west Wales? The opening meeting at the South Tees Motorsport Park, Redcar versus Sheffield, in 2006, wasn't much better - for the same reasons. Track unfit for racing. And first impressions count, don't they?

I was at that meeting. Don't recall it being abandoned. I do remember the riders coming back to the pits after the first heat. They were covered, head to foot, in slurry. Typified the shambolic organisation of that Glasgow-at-Workington season. Hard to believe the Tigers re-emerged at Shawfield, a few months later, with huge crowds and professional presentation. Some of the Derwent Park crowds struggled to reach 350, partly because Glasgow had such a poor team (only Boston, also kicked out of the league, were worse), partly because the track/racing was a joke and partly because Glaswegians didn't want to trek down to Workington while west Cumbrians couldn't see the point of watching somebody else's side. EDIT: I'm going to stick my neck out and say the 'slurry' meeting was on the August Bank Holiday Monday (31st) afternoon against Middlesbrough. It was baking hot. The Bears won 53-23. Just dug out the programme. Promoter Dave Thomson clearly feared the worst when he wrote, in his Tiger Talk programme notes: "I would be surprised if we get through today without one or two hiccups behind the scenes as most of our regular track staff and officials are not with us." Explains the water/slurry fiasco. I seem to remember Glasgow skipper Steve Lawson later described the afternoon as the worst experience of his speedway career.

Trailing down to the East Midlands from Teesside to report on a Long Eaton v Middlesbrough match in the (I think) 1995 season. Glorious summer evening, not a cloud in the sky, yet the meeting was called off. When I queried the ref's decision, he took me out on the track. It was like a ploughed field! Too dangerous for push bikes, let alone speedway bikes, was his summation. Similarly frustrating, a few seasons earlier, was watching an hour of tractor racing at Odsal before the referee gave up and called off a Bradford versus Poole match. Crowd in the stadium, not a wheel turned. Almost every meeting Glasgow staged at Derwent Park during their 1987 'season in exile'. I was living in Cumbria at the time, and went to most of the matches. The track - bumpy, rutted and dusty - was a disgrace. Nobody did any work on it between matches. In the end, after one pile-up and/or visitors' complaint too many, Glasgow (or, as they became, Workington Tigers) were kicked out of the league, halfway through the season. One of the worst crashes involved Troy Butler, of Milton Keynes. Left him with a gash in the neck, I recall.

Got talking to a Derwent Park regular, who voiced serious doubts about the Comets' ability to run in 2018. With crowds this low, it's no surprise. One division next year?

Just back from this. Pretty well organised by Pickering & District Motor Club, who, mindful of forecast showers, kept a 34-race schedule ticking along at a fair lick. Some decent racing on a big, flat track at Riseborough, south-west of Pickering and very much in the middle of nowhere. Access via single-track back roads north of Castle Howard, through a muddy farmyard then down a bumpy lane. Class winners were Tom Cossar and Wayne Rickards (1000cc sidecars), Jamie Rodgers (500cc solos) and David Knowles (250cc solos). Didn't note who won the motocross class which, frankly, was pants. Admission was £10, a 16-page programme sold for £2 and the attendance I estimated at about 400. No problems with dust and the track held up very well.

Attended this as a neutral. A friend came along. He hadn't watched speedway since Belle Vue in the Seventies. I haven't been a regular - anywhere - for a decade. Both enjoyed it. Two things I found extremely irritating: riders' constant efforts to cheat at the gate, resulting in several re-runs, and the referee allowing same to spend ages 'gardening' before getting them under orders. A shock to see such a sparse crowd. About 550? Included maybe a hundred from Glasgow. By my reckoning, since reopening in the late Nineties, Workington have somehow managed to slash their attendances from 4,500 to 450. Now tell me British speedway isn't dying on its arse.

Thanks for the link.

Can anybody give me an idea of the classes and/or leading riders for Sunday's (30/7) British Masters Qualifier grasstrack at Riseborough? I did email Pickering & District Motor Club, the organisers, for details, but they haven't bothered replying. The poster, on the club's Facebook page, advertising the meeting doesn't even say what time practice/racing begins! Please don't advise looking in Speedway Star. I haven't bought it in years, and it won't be available within 50 miles of where I live.

In my experience, and I watch a lot of different sports, speedway fans are unique in getting at least as much pleasure from exciting racing as from seeing their team win. As I recall, in particular, from five years (1991-96) watching Middlesbrough Bears at Cleveland Park regularly (and Newcastle Diamonds at Brough Park occasionally), the home fans were always very appreciative of quality riders in the opposition line-up. I've noticed the same fair-minded attitude at every other track (can't bring to mind an exception) I've visited - and that's another 52.

I found myself (through work) over in Cumbria on two recent Saturdays. No speedway at Workington on either occasion. I'll be over there again this Saturday. Comets are at home. But it's going to tip down all day...

Sorry, but when an organising club is charging admission to an event, it cannot be allowed to get away with a shrug of the shoulders and mumblings about the 'wrong type of summer weather'. If organisers can't lay on proper watering facilities, they shouldn't be running meetings like this. Did the midsummer heat come as a surprise? Why were the two big water bowsers used only before the racing began? The 'sprayer' employed thereafter was absolutely hopeless. First time I've made the 300-mile round trip to the Master of Midshires. I certainly won't be doing it again.

My first - and almost certainly last - 2017 grasstrack meeting yesterday. The Peter Maddison Master of Midshires, near Ashorne, Warks, proved to be a fiasco. It was abandoned after 40 of 46 scheduled races owing to rider safety concerns about dust and inconsistent track watering. The only final staged was the 250cc solos, won by Henry Atkins. The Midshires Grasstrack Club proved wholly incapable of providing the necessary water provision. The action started an hour late, at 1.30pm, and it took almost five hours to get through 40 races. Pathetic. I'd say a third of an estimated 1,500 crowd, bored with the delays and fed up with the dust, had departed for home well before the enforced end. Still, at least the amateurishness of grasstrack continues to make similarly shambolic speedway appear vaguely professional. Plans to attend next month's Lincolnshire Poacher now scrapped. I'll go to cricket instead.

Here's an example: I barely watch any speedway nowadays (for most of the same reasons outlined by others many times on this forum), either live or on the telly. In this country, it's no longer value for money. Now, this season, I've had to be over in Cumbria (I live in North Yorkshire) on consecutive Saturdays, and thought 'I'll go to the speedway at Workington in the evening'. What did I find? On neither Saturday did the Comets have a meeting. It's a joke. When I was a speedway regular, more than a decade ago, you could count on every team having a fixture on virtually every one of their race days/nights.

Quite liked this season myself (though, at the time, I was watching a former National League team). IIRC, virtually every home match against a former British League team went to a last heat decider. Worryingly, however, the crowds barely increased. It meant for the promoter a big rise in costs yet barely any additional income. Away from home, on the track, it was an entirely different matter. The team I watched suffered numerous defeats by 30 points or more. Most matches, decided after a handful of heats, were a dismal spectacle. As a journalist on the local evening newspaper, at least I got to watch them for nothing. As you say, a return to one division seems inevitable because there aren't enough clubs (or riders) to make viable a two-division set-up.

What are Speedway Star's (ABC) weekly and annual circulation figures? How do they compare to, say, 1980?

Yes, I was sorry to hear this news. At 35, given his injury record, Luke (Clifton) may well decide to call it a day. I wouldn't blame him.

Sorry, it isn't (and never has been) the media's job to be a cheerleader for speedway - or any other sport. The media should always be objective.

Tough season for the Bears, 1994. It went belly up from the very first meeting, at Long Eaton, when No 1 Graham Jones, star winter recruit, was badly injured. He piled into the back of Neil Collins, whose bike had packed up on Station Road's back straight, IIRC. Jones didn't ride again all year. It meant a heavy reliance on guests. Never satisfactory. Paul Whittaker was a shadow of the rider he'd been at Hackney before sustaining a serious arm injury, and fellow long-distance traveller Alan Mogridge was hit and miss. The wild Mark Burrows was always likely to either crash himself or endanger a team-mate. As I remember, the heroics of Paul 'Banger' Bentley kept the show on the road that season. A young Stuart Swales did well in patches, too.

Always liked Brendan Kearney (since disgraced) and Tony Coupland (his gravelly tone, I suspect, the product of a lifetime's smoking) at Cleveland Park, Middlesbrough. And, having grown up with speedway at The Shay, Doug Adams.

Peter Craven. I was up at Meadowbank Stadium a few weeks ago (watching Edinburgh City play Annan Athletic), and asked a chap, who turned out to be City's chairman, to tell me where the Craven memorial was. Very kindly, he led me through a maze of corridors to the plaque. Having been moved from the foyer, it's now at the end of a particularly gloomy corridor. Whether it will survive the redevelopment of Meadowbank remains to be seen.