HenryW

I'm not sure why that is much of a concern....There are still at least 13 or 14 weeks until the start of the season.

Way back...maybe 1989, Edinburgh ran a little 2nd half competition where each week the top 5 riders from the meeting (or maybe just top 5 home riders) went into a 1 lap dash race. Last man dropped out and the other 4 came straight back round to go again. Repeat until you have a 2 man match race for 1 lap and a winner is found. That actually proved to be pretty entertaining but got dropped after a while...Shame. It would be fun to see that return.

I thoroughly enjoyed that meeting from Torun. It was a fine example of what this wonderful sport has to offer. I won't hold my breath for the British play offs providing the same quality on Sky

Both would probably have struggled to beat Darcy if he had still been interested in this competition

It was stated elsewhere online that a facility is available for Claus because he is racing in a Polish play-off match. I don't see anything in the rules that have been published online that suggests this is a valid reason for a facility but I'm not sure if all the little extra rules that get added later always get made available to us plebs

Without wanting to take anything away from Mark's title, there just seemed to be something missing when he became world champ without winning a GP that year...At least Tai has a win under his belt this year. Having said that, it's a shame that this year has been such a mess of injuries for the big names as his win would have seemed more impressive if there hadn't been so many injuries (including his own)...and given the way he has been racing this year, I think he probably would have won even with a full season of fitness from Holder, Ward, Sayfutdinov and Pedersen!

I wasn't as excited for Loram's win as I was for Havvy's... I'm not sure whether that's relevant or not, I just thought I'd share 1980 Final was held on the 5th of September which was indeed a Friday.

I might be wrong, but I seriously doubt that the SGP series actually has much impact on who is racing in the leagues in the UK. I think that is more about the money on offer and the time/effort required to compete over here...As you yourself mentioned, the money on offer from the GP meetings isn't spectacular,,,The other leagues that pay well that weren't available or quite so lucrative in the past are more relevant to the lack of top talent in the UK. Back when the one day finals were around, the British league was King and the main pay day for riders, but now Poland, Sweden, Russia, Denmark, Germany, Czech Republic, etc, offer other options that can be more lucrative without the worry of having to get bikes across the Channel. I've never been a fan of this argument. Yes, the organisers of the series have some picks available to them, but in most years they work out better than those who qualified from outside the series, which suggests that they do a good job with the selections. Remember, there are only 4 out 15 places that are "given out/gifted". The other 11 qualify, and fairly often at least one of those "gifts" goes to a top star that has suffered an injury in the previous season.

Sean Wilson at Sheffield was surely the pick of the 2 pointers in 1986. Of course, he would always have made his way into a team regardless of whether that rule had been there anyway!

It will be interesting to see how Frede does at this level after so long a break. He confirmed earlier this month, after a few practice sessions, that he would come over and race in the main meeting for Derek Sneddon's testimonial. I wasn't expecting him to be making a league comeback in Denmark as well, but I guess that he thought the best way to prepare for taking on Cookie round the Dale was to take on Nicki round Holsted

If Sky do drop out, I wonder what chance there is of seeing British Speedway appearing on the new BT sports channels. As far as I have seen, they have a very limited list of sports that they have actually got the rights for. They have scooped up plenty of the football leagues, and I guess that makes sense as football is the big driver for sports tv subscriptions in the UK, but their diversity looks pretty poor...A bit of rugby union, the WTA, MLB, UFC and MotoGP (starting next season) seem to be the extent of their other main captures. British league speedway would probably be a useful little addition to fill up some of the schedule....

I guess it depends what you mean by that...Yes, there is a technical aspect to the smaller tracks but, IMHO, the sport is at it's most exciting when the riders are flat out and picking lines to maintain speed rather than scrub it.

I guess that the argument for making top league teams use home grown talent is that it forces the teams to invest in those riders if they want to win. Right now there might not be enough riders up to the standard of the current Elite League reserves, but why does that matter? To start with, pretty much all teams would be in a similar position with a lack of quality in a couple of team slots. As it stands just now there would be a small number of riders available who would be a good bit better than the rest that were available, and having them in your team would likely be a big advantage. Is that a bad thing? I can't see how it would be. It would make the good young British riders incredibly valuable and the ones that the money was thrown at. What an unimaginable horror...Young British riders being the valuable ones rather than young Danes, Swedes or Poles coming in on bargain assessed averages. If teams HAD to use British riders in the Elite league they would have to either develop them themselves or pay other teams for the services of those riders, financing the training of those riders at other clubs. With the current rules there is zero incentive for the Elite league teams to invest in the development of local riders. It's better for them to just leave it to some other club to do that work abroad and then scoop them up when they have learned their stuff without having to pay a transfer fee to another British club that has actually helped develop the rider. I know that the financial structure of clubs in Poland is completely different from the UK, but it's no surprise that Poland has consistently had the bulk of the best U21 riders for so many years when they force their top league clubs to use Polish kids at reserve. The clubs throw money at the kids and give them all the training and mechanical assistance that they can because they know that their chances of winning the league is virtually nil without good young Polish riders at reserve. Yes, some of them are completely out of their depth when they start racing in the Extraliga, but they quickly learn or get farmed out to lower league clubs to help them learn...Development is done from the top down there unlike here where it is done from the bottom up, if at all...

Did they not say in the commentary that Adams wasn't with him at this GP? As for "points were not paramount at that time"...Have you completely missed the way that the GP series standings are decided? Every single point counts. Yes, ensuring that Emil didn't have a chance to score more points on the night was important, but scoring less points yourself when it isn't required is just as important, if not more important.

So.....what? Should he bite his tongue or be like Kenny Carter? You seem to be agreeing that Kenny mouthed off a lot, but also saying that he let his racing do the talking...Seems like mixed messages.... Craig has beaten Ben plenty of times this year, including the race that caused the stramash....So does that make it all OK? That was a joking comment in reply to a friend....but clearly fun is out of the equation on this forum, so I'll just drop that one

Haha...That's a good one...Please, please, tell me that you were joking with that comment....Cos "Kenny Carter" and "bit his tongue" in the same sentence makes absolutely no sense at all to me.

What it needs is for decent prize money to be paid by IMG and then the National authorities might be able to hand out some decent money to those taking part. The prizes for the World Cup are a joke. With the Czechs seeded to the Final and Emil not racing probably the Russians were probably looking at 5th place at best. That would give them a prize of US$14,000, or €10,900 at current exchange rates. Out of that they have to pay for their own tyres at €65 each. Using a new tyre each race would set them back €2,600 for the 2 meetings. So they are now down to €8,300 for the team. Out of that €8,300, or €2,075 each assuming the same 4 riders race both meetings and the team manager isn't taking any payment, they have to pay their own travel expenses and accommodation costs, plus pay their mechanics and their accommodation costs...That's before even considering any expenses for the machinery being used... How the hell are they supposed to make any money out of that?

Ohhh...,I have to ask...What WAS the year that was the worst for injuries since the internet began? It seems like you maybe have the stats to back up the claim that this isn't Having jokingly said that, I do know what you mean....and I wonder if there ARE any stats recorded by the SCB/BSPA. It seems like something that they maybe should keep track of. There was a period from the mid 80's to mid 90's where almost every World Champion suffered a nasty back/neck injury in their career, which was obviously not good for the sport and that has not been seen since then...There was also a little spate of deaths around the same period which, thankfully, hasn't been seen again in UK speedway...So some things have certainly improved since that era.... However, I suspect that there might be a little bit of complacency coming into the sport when it comes to air fences. I wasn't at Coventry on Friday but, if reports that I have read are accurate, Chris Holder's bike lifted the air fence and he hit a very solid object behind the air fence...It almost seems like the lessons of the earlier eras have been forgotten as much more trust is placed in the air fences. The air fences are great when they catch a rider, but if they are moved out of the way by the bike then they are worth nothing and what is behind them needs to be carefully considered....You can't just have a solid wall behind an air fence and think that everything is fine because the air fence is there....

The strange thing to me is that it means that the race off meeting is guaranteed to be without the home nation. If they are seeding them to the final because they think locals wont turn up without them in there, it surely means the race off will be without these fans, and will be an even smaller draw to floating fans without the home nation than the final would be...It seems like the overall attendance over the two meetings is likely to be lower this way than having the home nation at the race off. It makes more sense to seed them to the race off and then they get an increased crowd for that, and with them enjoying home track advantage they have a chance to qualify for the final on merit. As for the selections by the various nations, I am quite surprised to see that Viktor Kulakov has got the nod for Russia. He hasn't exactly been scoring great in the meetings I have seen results from.

Have I missed something? Has there ever been any suggestion that Craig Cook wouldn't want to race for the UK?

Totally agree that this was NOT a World Pairs Final, and the FIM are certainly on our side in that regard! However, I thought you might have been supporting this new lot, considering how much BSI are against them (just joking, btw) In some ways I am happy to see "marketing" companies getting involved in the sport and trying to push the image forward, but I would rather they were brought into the league systems in each country rather than re-inventing more international competitions...

I thought some of the racing was actually really good, certainly better than what gets served up by the Elite League each week. However, that was completely nullified by the poor quality of the presentation. As has been said elsewhere, there was a complete lack of atmosphere and very little enthusiasm from the commentary team...and that's before we even consider the poor intro to the meeting, missed races at the start and then missing the start of a race (which actually looked like it was really good from the replay clips) after a commercial break. I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but despite not being a "subscription channel" itself, Eurosport is only available in the UK bundled with other TV packages, i.e. Sky or Virgin, it's not available on freeview (digital terrestrial TV)

Nope, that's not it because the meeting has now started

Not to mention the fact that the speedway hasn't actually started, so there is no rush for them to leave the tennis match...

The British National team is surely the top level of British speedway, so anyone racing for Britain is still giving priority to British speedway.