HenryW

What they said on UK TV was that he had a back injury which was due to be operated on in a few weeks. He wanted to limit his racing until then and if he raced tonight he wouldn't be fit to race tomorrow, but if he didn't sign in for the meeting tonight he would be banned from racing anywhere tomorrow by the FIM...So he signed in but didn't race so that he could race in the Polish league tomorrow. No idea if any of that is accurate but it was what was said on UK TV.

Do you think Tai needs to check his workshop to see if any engines are missing?

Now said on TV he has a back injury and only signed in to this meeting so that he can race tomorrow.

Do you know why?

It seems unlikely that he will push Holder, Doyle or Laguta out of the side so as long as those guys stay fit he'll probably not see any track time this season.

Great news. Although it never produced any World stars, the Linlithgow track provided many solid premier league performers over the years it was running and it would be great to see this happening again.

Always a pleasure to watch Grisha at work.

I'm not sure if that is the case. If you have an ancestry visa you are supposed to be treated the same as a citizen and do not have the same restrictions placed on you as you do with other visas.

I have to admit that I never really understood the argument about how awful someone was for offering a drug for sale...As far as I am aware BFD never forced anyone to take any drug, he just made them available. If you are dumb enough to choose to use crystal meth then surely there is a point where you need to take responsibility for your own choices rather than blame the person that made it available to buy.

I have to admit that I was surprised by the suggestion that "walk up" ticket sales would be hit hard by the weather. Away from the big indoor stadiums, surely by now the SGP series should be selling most of its tickets in advance. If it is still relying heavily on "walk up" sales, it's doing it wrong. For what it's worth, I enjoyed the meeting on TV...It was close to, if not the most entertaining GP so far this year, but the competition has been sadly lacking for that title.

The hole in that logic is the fact that several riders have been given wild cards without racing in the qualifiers in the past, including Mr Ward himself... I am sure the FIM knew what they were doing and that they knew that riders had been given wild cards without racing the qualifiers in the past, so their suspension term wasn't a blocker to him rejoining the series in 2016. If they had wanted him to be unavailable for selection to the 2016 SGP series they would have explicitly stated that in the judgement, just like they explicitly stated that all his points between the Latvian GP and his suspension date were to be removed...something that the British speedway authorities have completely ignored.

You have picked the "top premier league" riders from this year, carefully leaving out the likes of Brady Kurtz, Robert Lambert and Nick Morris who, barring any disasters for them, are all likely to go on to have international careers. At the same time you select a bunch of riders from across 5 seasons in the late 80s and early 90s, most of whom made it to a World Final. I will grant you that 1989 was a very good year for the old National League with a good few of the riders you listed all racing that year and racing at a high level, but adding in Butler, Crump and Thorp stretches the period you are covering quite considerably. Does that mean that the Premier League in the mid 2000s was super strong, as Bjerre, Kolodziej, Harris, Iversen, Zagar, Batchelor, Zetterstrom, Holder and Woffinden were all racing in the league during a 5 year period then. As for the 1981 NL...I'm not convinced that was anything special compared to recent Premier League seasons.

By train, the nearest station is Gündlkofen, which is about 2.5KM from the track.

Or maybe it's time to get harsher. Move at all and you are disqualified. That might help riders sit still.

This is what I don't understand about going to this stadium...it's small. I can understand using temporary tracks to get into large stadiums but not this one...Given it also has no roof this makes no sense at all.

There was always a risk this would happen but Peterborough wouldn't have been certain until the Danish teams picked their riders for this date...Denmark use a squad system so it's never certain if a rider will be racing or not...and of course they only just added Emil to their own team when the Thorsell signing was refused.

The Oxford dictionary defines a legend as An extremely famous or notorious person, especially in a particular field. Nicki seems to fit that definition just fine. Do you really think that people will boo Darcy when he returns? I would imagine that the number who would do this would be very small indeed.

To be fair, he failed a test one time. That doesn't mean that he was never over the limit at other meetings, just that he wasn't tested at those ones. There were a good few people telling us that he didn't look like he was under the influence at all in Daugavpils and yet he was well over the limit...Maybe he has never raced like that before or maybe he regularly did...We will never know. As I have said many times before, I don't understand why riders aren't routinely tested before EVERY meeting. It's cheap, quick and easy to carry out a breath test. Why is it only being done randomly for a few riders in a few meetings? Test every rider at every meeting. If they are over the limit, they are out the meeting but can race the next day if they are sober again...Lengthy bans like Darcy has suffered wouldn't be needed if everyone was tested at every meeting. The length of ban is being used as a deterrent, and that makes sense for drug tests which are more expensive and time consuming to carry out, but makes no sense for alcohol.

Having now seen the incident that took PK out the meeting in Riga, I think I owe him an apology for this comment. That was definitely not his fault and I don't understand how Loktaev wasn't excluded for that one...

It's the same most years...you usually get 1 decent qualifier at most and the others are fairly uninspiring.

Vaculik and Jepsen Jensen both out...Didn't see that coming. Other than maybe Piotr Pawlicki I don't think there is anything more exciting coming out of this meeting compared to the Riga one.

According to SportoweFakty he was 7th after all riders had completed 4 races. Maybe they made a mistake with that.

Surely he is still in the top 7 even after that...

Kildemand would be a good permanent addition to the series if he could ever learn to stay on his bike in these events.

Thought that myself but gate 3 didn't deliver much during the meeting. I guess he got a really bad start there.