AndyM

I'm pretty sure I did see some Aces home matches in 1971, but the programmes have gone AWOL. However, I do have a programme from Coventry v Hackney in the same year, which may have been my first meeting (we had relatives living in Coventry.) Anyone else see that match? Started going regularly in the 72 season, which was one hell of a great year to be an Aces fan

Good luck to Steady. Always believed trips like this add to a rider's education and ability to adapt to different track conditions. Hope he gains something useful ready for next season, and preferably not a broken leg!

Thanks. I remember Kerr, but I'd forgotten the other names.

Were any of those riders on the recent US junior tour of the UK?

And on that we can agree, Subedei! I think no less of PC in the days after his comeback, his mobility impaired by severe shoulder injuries. He was and always will be my teenage idol!

Don't think that was ever in doubt, though I sometimes wonder whether he's like the select few who have the ability to go all the way but have a psychological barrier when it comes to the REAL prize. Don't think it's true, but there's no doubt that there are many excellent riders who seem to get to the brink of greatness but somehow pull back at the last moment. And it's not really predictable who they are. I feared Crumpie might be among the number after coming second three years in a row, but he finally got there. Will Nicholls prove his talent, and if so, when?

Sorry Full Throttle, I wasn't aware that either Coventry or Belle Vue competed in the Swedish League, let along that Coventry had won it. Must help to explain all that fixture congestion!

Well done, Norman. Another achievement to follow your erudite scribblings and eloquent posting! Not sure I'd describe Danny Kelly as "greatly amusing" though - bit of an aquired taste!

I'm not having a pop at KK, Robyn - he may well have won in dry conditions too, and good luck to him for that. But this is no way to run a meeting with a world title at stake and not a way to establish the winner - anything could have happened! In fact, if I were Kasprzak I'd be less than happy too - the circumstances will always detract from his right to have been awarded the title. Quite sure he'd have preferred to win the title fair and square on the track by beating his rivals with all races completed.

No, my point is that by creating more meetings between no 1s, their average is artificially reduced. Fine, the fans want them to meet 3 times in a meeting, but the results underestimate the rider's ability. In 13 and 15, there always has to be at least one loser!

Sounds like the sort of outcome that brings the sport into disrepute. Didn't they have a reserve day to account for rain-offs?

On the latter point, the current race format artificially inflates the averages of reserves and second strings and deflates the averages of top riders. If we used the old system, the Crumps, Nicholls, Adams and Pedersens of the league might well be on 11+ averages.

The classic retort is that if you can do better, put some of your money into this venture! If we were all shareholders in speedway clubs, we'd understand the constraints far better. It's a falacious argument of course, since what holds back many clubs is lack of management and marketing expertise, effective strategic planning to determine what changes are required, resources in terms of people and funding, and often the basic imagination to see what could be improved. And this is where fans could help. This is by the by - the thread is about rule changes, so my preference is to create rules which enable promoters to succeed and don't over-regulate them into submission.

Too right. But what form that consultation takes and how the results are communicated is what counts. For example, let's say you're a Tesco shopper; you might feel you've earned the right to make comments on board decisions taken by Tesco by virtue of spending £200 there every week, but clearly it won't happen. However, if you take part in Tesco consumer surveys and express how you feel about their prices, stores, range of goods etc. there's a fair chance that some changes might come about if other consumers feel likewise - to prevent you taking your £200 elsewhere and to coax you to part with another hard-earned 50 quid. That's the bit speedway promoters have rarely twigged - how to present the product to their core audience and how to win over more. More than that, how to add value to make the product worth more at the turnstile, to increase revenues as a safety net against rising costs while increasing attendances simultaneously. Quite a trick - needs skill and patience. Ian Thomas did it quite well this year, but then things at Belle Vue had fallen a long way, and a bit of success was always going to appeal to Aces fans. Can he do the same next year? Clearly that takes a lot more understanding of the average fan!

More complications! Holes and heads spring to mind...

There was a call some years ago for teams to be placed in any order a manager wants and for replacements to be made freely - so long as all members of his team ended up with the equivalent number of rides. Don't think it would be popular with fans, who would end up with much more scribbling to do, but I do think we're vastly over-regulated and need to give much more leeway to team managers to operate tactically without the need to find loopholes in the rules, deliberately drop points, manipulate averages etc. etc.

As you all know, I don't approve of the semi & final format, but I'm all for eradicating that kind of injustice - must as Sky love it! Agree with that idea, myself.

Good for them. All the more reason to open the field out - might encourage the rest to develop their own young talent - the UK, for instance!

"National balance" has been the curse of world championships since I can remember. It would be good if we could have one year at least where riders qualified on merit, regardless of nationality, just to see what difference that makes.

No, no, no - we'll have to agree to differ, Henry. Your idea is at least clear and easy to understand, and therefore better than arbitrary selection, but the World Championship has always been clearly differentiated from league speedway and subject to qualification. That's what makes it special.

Au contraire, I want all the best riders to qualify by rights on the track, and for the best rider in the world to win from among them. What could be fairer than that? By taking away the rights of any rider to win the championship, you would be closing the GP circus off and making it a clique available to the very few. Far from making it more democratic, you would reduce the opportunities.

The wildcard is irrelevant since no wildcard entry can become world champion - and the beauty of the old one-off championship was that it did throw up some unlikely qualifiers and even winners on occasion. That will (almost) never happen with the GP circus, though I know that's not what we're discussing now! Put simply, selecting riders by any process will almost never mirror a series of qualification events, because unexpected things happen in real life. And so it should be! If you select the same batch of riders year in, year out, on the grounds that they just happen to be top of the league averages, the sport will never move on and enable new superstars to be created. Do you think PC would have won the championship at 22 with this bureaucratic tangle?

Too costly to run.

But there's the world of difference between the GP circus and league averages - even assuming all the best riders choose to ride in all the Euro leagues anyway (eg. several from your list don't ride in the EL.) Head-to-head is the only way, be that over several meetings or a one-off sudden death clincher. In any case, selecting riders who you consider to be the "best" by whatever devious or arcane process means you're almost certain to miss the form horses - those who have come up through the ranks quickly, which is after all what we want. Of the riders who you select now, several are likely to be going through a dodgy patch by next year and may not be worthy of their place.

The point is whether these should be arbitrarily selected. We could all come up with our own top 15, Henry, and between us we might name 20 or more riders. Why should BSI or anyone else be entitled to play God? Isn't it better than the riders show they are better on track, even if that means one or two fancied names get knocked out in the process. After all, the best 15 are those that score most points where it matters!