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Posts
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Everything posted by teijahn
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Very disappointing meeting, especially given the supposed increased banking, widened corners and shale surface changes. Track certainly didn't show the multiple racing lines and improved racing that was the intent of the changes. Doesn't auger well for tonite where I had been expecting a first class GP on the back of track improvements.
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Gomonchuk site has this scheduled, maybe not live though. https://www.youtube.com/@gomonchik/streams
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Is HBO Max the sole option for live online viewing?
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Is this meeting on a temporary track, or have Warsaw now got a permanent speedway track?
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Great meeting, enjoyed it, track was good. Congrats to Lambert, I'm not a fan but a deserved win on the wave of recent excellent form. Missed opportunity by Brady, with a rare meeting in which BZ didn't get setup right. Thought Fricke was stiff and deserved a better outcome, he needs to keep finding form to lock in a top 7 or he wont be there next year.
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Doyle and Fricke aren't yet replaced. Excluding Holder, who will continue to slip down the order, Fricke is currently 7th in standings, and two points off 5th place. Doyley faces a tougher situation being 12 points off 7th place. With 4 GP's to go quite a bit can change below the top 3/4 who have a buffer over the rest. Who has been replaced at this stage, and will remain replaced, is Parnitski and Kubera. I take your earlier point about the Aussie Quals being tricky, it must be a right pain in the proverbial for the better riders to have to come back here, bring motors/bikes for a one week ordeal involving 4 meetings spread over thousands of miles. Great for fans but very tough on riders and no doubt an expensive exercise, and at the present stage, there are 10 Aussies good enough on our tracks to be viable chances for one of the too few 3 or 4 allocations. As a number of us have commented on in this thread, the qualifying system has a number of flaws in it and does not assure that we wind up with the best 15/16 riders in the world. Its more of a junket for 2nd and 3rd tier riders than a serious attempt to discern the genuine top echelon of riders. There are more intelligent options, some of which have been bounced around in this thread, but unfortunately, intelligence doesn't seem to be a feature in the decisions of FIM and organizational levels of speedway.
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Hard to see Denmark not winning the Latvian semi. Will be an interesting weekend at Riga. Track has had a major overhaul, corners widened, camber almost doubled and a new oil shale surface, intent being to open up racing lines and improved racing. Lets hope they've been successful, basically it will be a new track for all riders.
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There is only 5 points between 5th & 9th place (excluding Holder who will get a wildcard) with 4 GP's to go, that covers Woryna, Madsen, Fricke, Dudek & Thomsen. Three of those will likely fill out the top seven. Lebedevs and Doyle, a further six and eight points away, would need a couple of finals, unlikely on this years form, to feature in the seven. Thomsen is having a great season all round but will run out of GP's if Holder and Bewley are back for the last two. Unless the 4th wildcard comes into play from SEC duplication (and he gets it), or Freddie retires he will miss out unfortunately. As regards Kvech, who also will not make next years GP's he is a younger rider (for the modern age), having a great season and still on the improve. Highly likely that he can be a GP regular in the future.
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Far better meeting than I expected. Congrats to all 6 or maybe 7 qualifiers, and to Dave Goddard and commentary team for good coverage. A pleasant change from Kelvin and his parrot. The downside of the system of knockout comps that lead to the Challenge is that better riders can left behind due to injury/incidents/mechanicals (or in stronger countries lack of initial qualifying allocations) and thus enable a weak field and lower standard of qualifiers as has happened this year. Thomsen missed his qualifier due to injury, Piotr Pawlicki had only two rides in his, and Jan Kvech three in his. They are far better riders than many that made it here tonite. And for example Lidsey, Becker, and Rohan who all had blinders (for them) in the qualifiers continually prove that they cannot perform consistently at the top level. To my mind a better system to determine the top 15/16 riders for GP's would be use the seasons top riders from the league comps as the starting point for qualification. No rider under a 2.0 point heat average in the leagues (maybe 1.8 in Polish extraligue) is going to be competitive for a GP season.
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The general ineptitude that pervades speedway organisational levels seems well in play here. If the goal of qualifying was to determine the best 15 riders, why would you stack 4 of the 5 top SGP2 (2025 Finals) riders, now with a years more experience, in the one round at Pardubice? Tough draw for the rest of the field, who are right up against the odds here. Similar thing happened earlier this year in the Challenge Quals as well, lopsided events. I realize there would be a draw involved but surely it would make more sense if the higher ranked riders were spread across the qualifiers rather than put in the same one.