uk_martin

No. He's just been around speedway for more than 5 minutes.

It appears that they are sealed. So "Sealed GTR" engined riders will have to compete against "Tuned GM" engined riders. Should be interesting. How long will it take Edward Kennett (other cheats are available) and his team of accomplished hole borers to find a way to open the seal and re-seal an engine after playing around with its insides? £4,000 PLUS 20% VAT = £4,800.00 - Is that still a bargain? I dunno... Brand new GTR vs partly used, newly reconditioned & tuned GM...I wonder if it will take off? What will the riders choose? Best of luck like, but not holding my breath here.

Can we sign this Gerhard Engine bloke? Lots of chatter about him on another thread. Will he have a 3.00 average? He sounds like a low maintainence kind of guy. He does have a British passport doesn't he?

Do You seriosly expect that a rider who signs up and then crys off is the sort that Graham Drury would want in his team? Burnt bridges spring to mind.

Kinda says it all when Aidan Collins became British Champion at this flat track malarkey a couple of years ago.

Not sure about the Polish legal system, but putting the press release into a British context, it sounds very much like what we would call a "class action" which sets a precident for everyone in that class (in this case Warsaw GP ticket holders) to benefit from it. The judgment was specific about the scope of compensation, which should be for half the ticket value (probably meaning the original retail price, not any black market prices like some had to resort to) and accommodation. It doesn't say in the press release how many nights of accommodation is covered but that's bound to be in some small print somewhere, maybe one night, maybe two. There's nothing to suggest that travel costs are to be compensated, but again, maybe that little devil is in the detail too? Sounds like there are going to be a lot of letters going to the PZM now with claims for them to process. The problem will be, if you haven't kept your ticket stub, proving that you are entitled to compensation, and producing the hotel bills from 20-odd months ago. Anyone who's written the whole episode off as a bad experience and who's not kept their paperwork is going to struggle, but those with their tickets and receipts in their hands will have the opportunities to get some Zloties back.

Are you landing at 13.45? If so, allow for being through passport control and being "in country" by 14.30. Allow for a wait for the bus and a journey to the railway station that will get you there by 15.15. (A taxi may be an alternative if there is a longer wait for the bus) There is a 15.40 train that gets you to Torun at 16.30. The train station in Torun is a bit"out of town" so take a taxi to your hotel. So by 17.00 you should be cheched in. The hotel can book you a taxi to the stadium so you'll have a bit of time to freshen up and start the process of deciding if Lech, Tyskie, Zubr, Perła, Zywiec or Warka tastes best.

A decent start then. What would be good is to have a BSF Honours Board or something (remember those from school? lol) where all the riders who graduated can be added to a permanent thread, and their names remembered for the efforts that they put in. Each year, new names can be added.

The fact that a breach of Health & Safety is a CRIMINAL as well as a civil offense means that those in charge face fines, and possibly jail unless their procedures are water tight. 99 out of 100 people's worst consequence of coqing-up at work is getting the sack. Coq up over H&S and the consequences are far worse. No wonder they are cautious, because with no-win-no-fee lawyers ready to sue them into a black hole in space and the H&S Executive ready to land them in court in front of a judge and jury, wouldn't you be cautious too?

Maybe what happens next is what always happens in speedway. The situation deteriorates from childish to infantile. What else do you expect?

He started 2016 on 9.91 and ended it on 8.59 I'm sure I read something by Brian Buck that said that Birmingham were made to forfeit the assets that they had ... Edit - found it

Now that Lakeside have dropped down into the NL, have they had to relinquish all their riding assets like Birmingham did? If so, is Zach Wajtknecht a free agent again? i.e. NOT under any priority obligation to ride for Lakeside? Would he still be an option for the Brummies on his newly reduced average, I wonder? There's certainly some "unfinished business" to be tidied up I think.

Depends on if they have a track to ride on. Has anyone been past the Swindon building site? Is anything happening there?

Can anyone give a progress report about this scheme please? Who has "graduated" through the course and making a success of themselves in league racing? Who is starting out who we can hope to see next year?

More a daydream than a team. Neither location has the use of the stadium secured, Belle Vue doesn't have a promoter at the helm, Coventry is the subject of a Police investigation whilst the stadium lies in ruins. IMHO, there's a few basics that have to be dealt with before we start singing from the rooftops about this "team". And then there's Swindon. To quote the statement - "Swindon, who are due to move into their new stadium in June, will also enter a team into the National Trophy with riders from sides who aren’t in the mini tournament." - What's that all about? A team of 7 guest riders who will wow the Swindon public for all of 4 meetings only? Will Swindon have to have the same 1-7 or can they pick a team of track specialists for each of their away meetings? Is this like making things up as you go along, or what? And what if the developers "do a Reading" and don't deliver on their promise of a new stadium there?

And who is the promoter of the "senior partner"? As in the person(s) not just the generic team name.

So we have a cobbled together BV / Cov team who in the worst case scenario could be homeless unless agreements to use the stadiums are secured, and there's this part time Swindon Sprockets team being mooted. Jumpers for goal posts, anyone?

It was in the papers today that the deal to save Coventry stadium was in doubt again, with the landlords fetching the Police in. Belle Vue is anything but secure at the moment, so only in speedway can you take two clubs that are only 50-50 to operate at all and make up one team that is purported to be "sure" to run at both venues. What drugs are these people taking?

Whatever.

You're full of bright ideas today aren't you? Add 5.5 hours to the length of a race day, subtract that from the length of the waking day and thete will be loads of time for detours and social calls won't there?

Whatever. Birmingham to Snetterton = 142 miles (per Giggle Maps) thus 284 miles there and back. @55mpg in my car, that's roughly 5.16 gallons of diesel. 5.16 gallons = 23.46 litres. And at £1.11 per litre at Asda, that's a few pennies more than £26.00 for fuel, plus £5 admission = £31. Do the 5.5 hours driving time along the M6 & A14 etc count towards the entertainment value too?

Or more likely that the product is no good at ANY price? Nor me. I didn't go either. HOWEVER, the sport-going public with money to spend DID go! More to the point, they chose athletics over speedway over for where to spend their money. That in the eyes of the money spending public makes speedway a poor choice. Do you have research to back that up? Or is it just a gut feeling? Don't say it's "common sense" because speedway as a sport is a common-sense-free zone. Check out this... http://www.tutor2u.net/economics/reference/price-elasticity-of-demand You'll see that some products will retain their demand no matter what the price (within reason) and some will stand or fall depending on very small price changes. Without proper research you can't just say what will happen to the demand for speedway.

Correct, you haven't. Firstly, it really doesn't matter what the headline price is. Whether it's £13 which is then discounted by concessions down to something akin to £8, or whether it's £10 flat rate. What matters is two-fold. Firstly what it means to the fans. Do they pay £8 or do they pay £10, and you'll agree that £10 is more than £8 so your flat rate idea is going to push the cost per "average" (OAP) fan up by 25%. Secondly, what impact does it have on the clubs revenues. Unless you have the research at hand at how much demand will rise or fall depending on whether there's a £1 rise in the price or a £5 reduction in the price, I'd say that this is an unknown factor. This whole panic about inflation is doing my head in. Birmingham, whose admission I've had to pay, started out in the PL in 2007 at £15 per adult. It stood at £15 even in the EL (if I remember rightly, or did it go up to £16, I can't remember now) and now since 2015 it's been at £13 in the NL. I've not heard about any impending price rise, but if the price went up by £1, what sort of rise would that represent in the long term? How can you put a value of £10 on NL speedway? Or any other form of speedway come to that? The value is what people are prepared to pay. Up the road from Perry Barr, not long ago, 50,000 people paid between £30 and £50 to see Usain Bolt for 10 seconds. Is that good value? Or is everyone else wrong? The price is not the game changer for speedway. It's the quality of the product that matters. Despite the stability in the admission price since 2007 and the on-track success of the teams, crowds at Perry Barr have fallen year on year (with a slight blip at the start of the EL era). You can even say that in real terms, the price reduced compared to everything else that was getting more expensive around it. And still the crowds fell. Never once have I heard someone say to me "how much is it in, at the speedway...oh, that's too much" Plenty of times I've heard "nah, it's boring. First out of the start wins" and other disparaging comments about the state of the viewing, or the long delays between races and other things. People have the money to spend if there is value to be had. (as I found out in trying to get a ticket for the Guns'n'Roses gig) Speedway's challenge is in providing better value for the money.

Feel free to disagree, but I can't see the logic of your arguement. On the one hand you say that a "fair" overall price of £10 means that you won't need concessionary admission for old-timers. Having agreed by implication with my point that the average take at some places is about £8 per head because of concessionary admission, meaning that the majority of people coming through the turnstiles a very old or very young, what you are saying is that the majority of fans need to have their admission prices increased from the average of £8 to your "fair" £10. On the basis that this is more than the rate of inflation, you're not going to have too many places left to visit then, if your pricing structure were to be adopted.

Depends if you like what you see. I'm no big football fan so if I was to pay £30- £50 to see a scoreless draw I'd consider that 15 mins of speedway @ £1 per minute would compare quite well.