moxey63

I used to watch the delight, the amazed glare when newcomers experienced their first speedway race live at the track. Certainly a spectacle that holds the attention... if early on. But the novelty value will wear off, if the rules and regulations are a joke. It is a great sport, but the rules seem to let it down more and more each season. Simplify things, and not something that only the people making the rules as the only ones knowing what's frigging going on. Team racing is speedway's life-blood, and I lost interest with team speedway because it was no longer a team thing. When you stop looking back and can remember various team line-ups, not just your own, you know something has gone wrong. Even more sad, is that the line-up we don't remember could be the present year's. Now... ask me, say, for the Leicester team of... er... 1976.

But would Tai be bothered and actually ride in it? Would they have to hold it outside the UK for him?

Our local council's Health & Safety is that strict, they wear gloves when opening the choccy biscuits in case of paper cuts.

Pray tell... is the National League now the First, Second or Third Division? I somehow lost track after when they re-branded speedway by changing the names of the leagues. And.. what's wrong with sharing venues anyway? Everyone shares everyone else's riders nowadays. Speedway is a washday sort of sport, some idiot puts the whites in with all the colours.

Was thinking earlier, about speedway and its future. A sport that loses glamour clubs like Cradley, Reading, Oxford in an instant and struggle to get them back, Bradford vanishing after winning the league, and now Coventry appear doomed, it does make you think that the only certainty about speedway... is its past.

From memory, I may be wrong, but Russ had scored a reserve (3 ride) maximum against Hackney in May, 1977, and then injured in the second half, which wrote his season off. His first match back, the start of March 1978, he fell, injured again, and called it a day as his knock would have seen another lengthy lay-off. In 1977 he was the Belle Vue rider that local brewery Wilsons used on billboard throughout the region. Wish I could have swiped one of those back in the day but had no ladders. Anyway, am scared of heights! Another memory was at Halifax in 1976, when Russ had a bad fall and was in a bad way for a while, out on the track. I may agiain be wrong, but I seem to recall there was no ambulance at the Shay that night. Sad to see another of my schoolboy heroes leave the track.

Suppose I'm a funny so-and-so.... but I didn't find it interesting when it happened. Perhaps in 20 years' time...

Course it has a future. However... doesn't help that the likes of Retro Speedway and certain pages of the Speedway Star revert back to the olden days.... making us realise just how bad today's product really holds up. Just imagine though, modern day fans, in 20 years from now you will no doubt be reading about the tricks and scrapes today's riders got up to. I can't wait either......

It is astonishing how times have changed, even the last five years. People want things instantly now... and speedway has a problem here. How do you keep a youngster coming along to watch the sport for the first time interested, say, in the gaps between the heats, or the needless re-runs, tractor breakdowns. You have to love speedway to put up with those things. Can you imagine a spotty teenager nowadays, who doesn't even have to sit through ad-breaks on TV in this SKY+ world, putting up with two fat geezers trying to push a broken down truck from the track on a chilly Manchester night? We live in different times than when we started attending. Speedway's quirks then are frustrations now. The imagination of a younger fan is all over the place like car a supermarket trolley. They have so much else to occupy them, when we had just the programme to stare at between the gaps. Not one solution would fix speedway's problems. Bits and pieces are falling apart. You say this would fix it, I say that would. But a lifetime of trying to fix the problems we thought we had 30 years ago have resulted in what we have now. It is still a good spectacle though, on its day. But any serious attempt to keep the people coming back a second and third time must be addressed by the reasons good folk who have been attending for years are being driven away. Tigerowl, who has done good work for the love of his sport.. I am suspecting he is another.

I think speedway sets itself up too many times for a fall. If it were Laurel & Hardy, it'd be funny.... You can see it right now, next season's promotion/relegation scrap, the heart-tugging choice of the double-upper, as he has to choose what team he's on! Why-oh-why, promoters, do you set yourselves up. It ain't funny, and it ain't clever.... and I ain't gonna be part of it.

Can't be positive... when watching the death of anything.

mikebv Exactly. I have just been thinking, it was about 1994-ish when I began withdrawing my full passion from supporting Belle Vue. It was because, even then, it dawned on me that the team was no longer my team, as it was really the start of multi-country racing for many of the riders back then. I recall one night at Kirky Lane, waiting nearly an hour for a meeting to start, a 4TT, because a glut of the riders involved had been held up en-route from the Swedish League. I started getting cynical about my team, about the sport, because of the way teams were thrown together, the way riders began focusing on more than one country in other leagues. I remember when teams were teams, and could not be fooled by supporting guys, many of them who were operating because it was a free date in their diary. How can you throw your emotions and efforts into cheering on a team that is not a team?

Is there too much money going out of the sport - machinery and tuning it, for example? Riders having multiple machines must cost a fortune to maintain. For domestic racing, you do not need mega-bucks spending on machinery, as long as it's an equal playing field. Perhaps I'm wrong, but there was once a day when even the top boys had two machines at best. for league matches. Even the raw junior nowadays seems to want the best of things, and this doesn't help the sport whatsoever. It is a small sport and should be treated as such when cloth needs to be cut.

The basics of anything should be foundations. It seems speedway is being ruined by a forever requirement of changing things. It is a waste of complete time and effort, blood and emotions, if the sport's rules are about so flimsy that you need to review them annually. We have a re-branding every winter but in another 12 months on we have another. One of the dangers of speedway... is that the forever changing rules is a put off. It is in danger of leaving many fans behind, who just can't be arsed keeping up. As a fan of over 30 years, as I was then, I was shocked when I couldn't answer a question another fan asked about one particular rule. I realised about then, that the exit door... it was primed for a hasty retreat. It was the fact that one new rule too many had just overtaken me. I know nothing....

Another reason speedway needs one hell of a shake. Make it simple... and such questions are needless.

Must say, the few things I really enjoy in the Star are the Brian Burford pieces, the recent one on retiring riders very good. Always enjoy his writing.

"Are they still available?" Is Santa coming down your chimney in 25 sleeps' time? Yes, they are available... I admired Jason Crump, but never bought his book. Did not appeal to me. Ditto Leigh Adams' book. I doubt I'd read Nicki Pedersen or Greg Hancock's, if they did one. Perhaps their respective off-track lives correspond with everything that is speedway 2016... perhaps too sanitised. That's why the Kenny Carter, Kelly Moran, Michael Lee books were so popular... as they had stories in them, raw, when life was more daring than the hairbrushed version we now live. You can't say it is time that makes the stars of yesteryear so appealing.... because I flicked right passed Billy Hamill's write-up in the recent mag.

Very good they are too!!!

Love the winter.... and the weekly pages of nostalgia in the Speedway Star. The only thing I tend to read in them, as much of the modern day news seems so boring, lacking characters, wide handlebars, 13 heats, proper bikes. If the modern day had as much interest as the olden times, we'd have the crowds of 40 years ago... and 13 heats. I, too, would rather a book on Dean Felton than Greg Hancock. There has to be a certain amount of character and rawness.. less plastic and more metal.

Does too...

This forum reminds me a little of the Monty Python sketch, "I Wish To Start An Argument."

Since John Perrin threatened annually to have to withdraw speedway from the Manchester people, starting sometime in 1994, any threat to a speedway club is taken with a pinch of salt. Speedway fans seem to live with the constant threat that the next meeting could actually be the last at their local track - Workington just being saved - and you cannot live a life of worry for the sport. When Perrin announced first of all, I was worried. But you can only take so much. Belle Vue will live on, like most tracks in trouble eventually do... but dark clouds and metal shutters will always be close by. We have a sport that seems to dangle from one year to another. I know one thing... I'd never buy a season ticket for a speedway track.

Always thought it risky to build a new stadium solely for speedway. The opening weeks were beset with problems and it was catch-up thereafter. Even as a local speedway fan I found it hard keeping up with what was actually Belle Vue's raceday, and I had Speedway Star and the internet to check. Part timers with nothing to do may have liked a night out at the Vue. But not having a regular night probably cost a few extra on the gate. The new stadium didn't have them pouring back into Belle Vue, like many had expected, and even having a second team probably cost more than the admission tills took. Sure there's a future though, a lovely track that should thrive after last year's hiccups.

Wouldn't have been as much debt... had PC agreed to pay his entrance fee. Seriously though, the clingers on... does this finally make you realise that all with the sport is not at all well?

No drugs in speedway... that's another reason I ain't interested anymore.... man.