moxey63

Hated him (as a Belle Vue and Peter Collins fan). Remember always looking forward to his usually really weak Halifax sides' visits to Hyde Road, just because he was there. Always capable of causing interest, as was the case his final visit to Belle Vue when he put Collins into the fence in 1986 and physically assaulted PC in the pits immediately afterwards. Two mohths later he was dead, along with his wife. Not just Carter, but people in general who carry as much interest are always remembered more than someone who went through life without a problem. Take away his final act, though I didn't like him at the time he raced... how the sport could do with him now.

It will be difficult to attract younger fans in sufficient numbers, so Speedway Sta and Philip Rising had better stop living the high-life! Don't worry Phil, I haven't been a regular at the speedway for a decade but still buy your mag (by the way, any chance of a history book covering domestic racing, with stats and major stories?) These days it is hard to imagine anyone taking to speedway the way we did. It is a time of a "want it now" attitude, and why should you wait yonks for the next race, as even those watching at home fast forward the gaps and just watch the racing. Going to a live match must be quite a yawn when you can't skip the needless airspace between the heats. As a fan for 40 years, I can never see a time I'd want to stand on the terraces for hours just to watch 15 races. And I know what the sport is all about, so why would an itchy toed youngster stand there for hours when he has a phone to prize away his attention. The attention span of people has never been so short.

Having read the Speedway Memories book about two years ago, it displayed that many were taken to their first match by an elder relative or friend. Rules and the like aren't important initially, it's the spectacle and the show that people will go away with the memory of. Huge gaps between races and music that doesn't appeal to the younger people will bring certain ridicule from young 'uns. The racing is what they are attracted to, but that is such a small part of the entire 90 minutes you are stood there. It's a long time with nothing to do. Youngsters have much more to do with their time nowadays; even we oldstagers notice the gaps between the heats more than we did in the past. Letting anyone under 16 in for nowt is a good idea, it will certainly persuade some. But you have got to be of that ilk to want to return. I mean to say, because I subscribe to SKY Sports for the speedway, I don't sit there 24-7 watching every other sport, because they are on. There has to be that interest from anyone to want go back again.

That's my thought exactly! Just look at the sport... and people, quite grown up type, actually think speedway deserves better publicity than it is afforded. Even the rider we wanted on the damn show can't be arsed racing in the country that supposedly put speedway right up there. Jog on my friends. It is a carboot sport, staged by men in weird jackets in dog stadiums, with buildings as offices that a portable cabins, glued together by a band on helpers (fans) that do it for love.

Right until the whistle, I thought Tai would win it... followed by Eddie Edwards and Crusty The Clown! Won't sit through that tosh again, they only featured people that I don't watch, much like the majority of stuff on the Beeb. Still want to know who counted the Briggo votes all those years ago... Don't believe the programme, and place it behind Question Of Sport for pulling power in our house.

Speedway invented Johnnie Hoskins! It is true though, about trying to get facts correct. In speedway, with all the figures that build up even over one season, it is really difficult to get things bang on. But you'd think World Final scorers would be spot on, the importance and the once yearly aspect. The more facts that a sport like speedway contain, the more chance some of them may not hit the print as they happened. This year quite a few editions of Speedway Star have printed corrections from previous weeks, but any researcher in the future will go on and record the report and facts as originally printed. For example, what was that match in 1974, the result of which was decided at conference months after the season as over... or am I dreaming again? Little things like this makes speedway all the more interesting to a sad person like Mr Mox. Better than the racing, perhaps....

As a col;ector of statdstics and a facts and figured buff, I have to be carefuk of my fat fingerd and the digits they press. Double check whar you type - alwayd.

Where have all the stars gone? We took them for granted back then, there were that many, and all we're left with are pretenders.

Hard to imagine, each appeared just thrice in World Finals. I think that's correct, off the top of my head.

Didn't know about Ross or Jessup, but the Penhall panto was the core of the World Of Sport coverage and that's why I can recall it. I like Penhall, don't get me wrong, and can't believe British Speedway was the draw of many such stars back in the day. As for his quitting Cradley, that was a rare sort of thing back then, a rider messing his club about. Shame it isn't so in the modern era. As for people getting upset about what Penhall said about Carter - get over it!!! We are becoming semi-pro's at being offended by comments... the "he said this, she called me that" sort of thing. Did you expect Bruce to lie? What sort of book would that have made?

My estimation of Bruce is jaundiced by that Overseas Final performance and the way he started to mess Cradley about later that year before quitting. The fact that he thought he could act was, perhaps, like me thinking I could have been his straight replacement at Dudley Wood. Anyone who can lift two world titles in a five year professional career should never be derided.

Watched the DVD. Was interested to view clips of the semi-final meet at Oxford. Does anybody have this meeting on video/dvd?

Is Belle Vue council-owned? Are the other two you've mentioned, WK? The thing is, there is always an uncertain air about a speedway track. For example, would Hyde Road have been allowed to disappear had it been a non-league soccer club? Land containing a speedway track often attracts interest from bulldozers.

Come on fellas. Don't expect these business folk running our sport to work wonders. Afterall, that is why the sport hasn't a club that actually owns its own stadium. That is why it has to rely on dog tracks to stage an almost 100-year sport. That is another reason we can't have one race day. ONE HUNDRED YEARS approaching, and we're in a worst state than 40 years ago.

British speedway has always existed on seven days a week. So what happened? The answers: allowed riders to dilly-dally into foreign leagues; relied on too many of the so-called team to race for another team, in another division; bowed to the more-attractive and powerful GP, which is expected. There will never be a set night for British speedway. So the solution is to try to address the three main problems I've listed.

Speedway will only redeem itself once one body is appointed to set the rules and disallow the ability of each club to act purely out of self interests. Some clubs appear to be stronger than the actual body that runs the sport. It is like a shopping complex this sport of ours, every track acting out of self-interest and trying to pull one over the other.The BSPA seem so weak. Then again, how daft is it to have a collective body that runs the sport individually run their own track? Both should be separate.

Promoters have had plenty of opportunity to freshen up the domestic scene but insist on giving the smelly sock a squirt of Fabreze instead of a fresh wash. Another Conference, same old same old. Another nail in that well sealed coffin lid.

It wasn't always perfect, but it was as damn near as was possible. Or was it the passing of time that made us old codgers less happy to settle for dross. In saying that, I have witnessed some cracking racing this year in the few times I've popped up my head to watch the TV. But the actual basis, the foundation of the sport and team-speedway ethics, I feel they have been ruined by riders stretching themselves out to thinly. A sport, a game, doesn't it have to be as good as its rules.. and in speedway's case, I feel the rules, the make-up, it is patched together in a make-do sort of mentality. Another winter of searching questions: another close season of totally different answers.

We will never return to the halcyon days of the seventies, I'm sorry to say. The pull of Test Matches will never be again, in my opinion, as their importance has been replaced by a stage of Individual speedway importance, the Grand Prix being the be-all and end-all, domestic duty seeming to me to be more of a day of each week for riders to keep busy. Team speedway has slipped down the pecking order for many riders. We have come the wrong way in my opinion, since the 70s, before the Play-Offs, when you knew your side's last fixture as early as March, the season carried on until the conclusion of October and not peter out as though there was nowt else after the EL Grand Final. I have to poke myself sometimes, remembering that we are still in October and the season is still in force. Similar with the Grand Prix. In an era we must have a Grand conclusion to everything, a Grand Final, we have a pointless trip thousands of miles to the other side of the world. But we know who the Champion is already. Anti-climatic. Anti-climatic - that is what you can say about the domestic scene. We put every emotion into the EL Finals. Once over, the speedway soul is lost and spends the final month closing early when many a fan used to get as much in before the winter break.

Perhaps it is human nature, the fact that nothing seems as it once were. We are after all talking about the 70s, people leaving their homes to attend speedway tracks for the magical Daily Mirror Tourney. That was a period people could actually be bothered to leave armchairs to switch TV channels and make sure, for instance, clocks were wound and watches too. We have too many first world luxuries, that perhaps weren't about in the seventies. I mean, who can imagine now getting up to change the vinyl on your record player. In the same breath, perhaps folk can't be energised into leaving their tablets, mobles and loadsa TV Channels for a night being brassed off at the speedway.

HACKNEY suffered floodlight failure during their April 12 World Championship quarterfinal, leaving part of the stadium in darkness after five heats, the meeting abandoned for safety reasons. Later it was discovered the night’s takings, thought to be in the region of £10,000, had been stolen during a break in at the speedway office, although there was no visible sign of forced entry. It was a continuation of problems for new owner Derek Howes who under the six-heat rule had to admit the crowd in free for the meeting’s restaging. Hackney closed for financial reasons a couple of months later, the last home meeting in the KO Cup against Newcastle on July 5. A last-minute rescue attempt failed, meaning there would not be speedway in the Capital for the first time in the sport’s history. Hackney raced 10 league, 10 Gold Cup and 2 KO Cup matches. They won just five of them. HACKNEY 1991 Division Two Whitaker, Paul 8.74 Olsson, Tony 7.79 Hamnett, Dave 6.57 Kalina, Vladimir 5.81 Warren, Michael 5.38 Hellsen, Richard 5.13 Karnas, Pavel 4.36 Pollard, Roland 2.25 Hunter, Tim 2.21 Phillips, Simon 2.00 Hardy, Julian 0.00 Sandford, Ricky 0.00 Source: Alan Robertson British Speedway Leagues 1991-2014. A terrific book indeed!

The SSKOC was treated like some mess on the bottom of your shoe in the latter years. Even with about eight teams, the competition seemed to drag on and didn't it, in the last year, see one semi played the night before the final, or something like that? The EL Play-Offs happening sometimes the same week dwarfed the KOC Final in popularity and I recall Belle Vue's 2005 KOC Final win, 30 years after their last one, was a damp squibb, coming a week after the loss to Coventry in the PO Final. The Finals should have been well apart.

The Play-Offs have proved popular, but should the bumper crowds compensate for a shorter season for those teams that didn't make the cut? To me, they are a jazzed up version of how important the SS Knock-Out Cup Final was, before the Play-Offs bullied it off the park.

It is just annoying, the Play-Off debate, when SKY give us all the big build-up all year, the (used to be) match of the week that pointed us in the direction of September and the Grand Final. Then, like an excited child, they whizz out the two semis on the same night, which makes me dizzy and unsure just what's going on. There is surely too much to take in, showing two meetings on one night (and, as in one of the semis, two races at once!). But that is just one gripe, Now, again probably just me, but I feel empty again. Speedway has sold its soul and at least one month has been wiped off fixtures, while SKY has sneaked off in the distance for the season, job done. I know the Play-Offs are in the main popular, but I can recall certain things about the old round-robin matches before the Play-Offs, like Glasgow's visits to Belle Vue in the mid-90s, Eastbourne's hammering at Kirky lane in '92. But I can't recollect much about the group matches since the Play-Offs began, the league matches, because it is only the Finals that count. Does it matter in the A or B matches if a team loses here or there, because there is plenty of time to put things right before presents are given out in September.

The entire season now is set up for a few weeks in September. Now, you can lose a glut of league fixtures and still end up as Grand Final winners. The league table, as Birmingham a few years ago would say, means nothing. Just attain a top four spot. It is about jockeying for positions. Mostly, sides that begin the season are never really the same when September dawns. If round robin matches were important, why would such a crowd turn up for last night's match? Where had they all been all year? The interest create by the Play-Offs has shaved fans off watching the league programme. Just my opinion, and therefore I believe I am right.