IainB

1 point each... move on

Interesting listening to Lemo on the Tatum Talks podcast where he mentioned that the 2024 SoN was a financial disaster and that (speaking in the week prior to the GP events) there were still 800 tickets available for the Friday night (just the £80,000)!

Re-arranged: July 6th 1 home match since May the 4th, next home match July 2nd!

I was down in Poole last Wednesday on a lovely bright and breezy day when you postponed your solitary junior development event of the season 😉

Staging a Speedway Grand Prix at a temporary venue like Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium is a massive financial gamble, heavily driven by infrastructure logistics. Because Alexander Stadium is primarily a premier athletics venue (with a fixed 18,000 capacity around its running track), hosting a GP requires building a bespoke, temporary dirt track from scratch and renting additional seating if you want to scale up. While exact, line-by-line budgets are kept strictly confidential by promoters, looking at what it takes to build a temporary track and secure an FIM license gives a realistic cost breakdown. You are looking at a total layout of **between £1.5 million and £2.5 million** for a single Grand Prix weekend. The major costs break down into three distinct pillars: ### 1. The Track Build & Logistics (£400,000 – £600,000) Creating a raceable speedway track inside an athletics stadium requires meticulous engineering to protect the existing international-standard running track. * **Protection & Base Layer:** Thousands of wooden boards or heavy-duty plastic geotextile membranes must be laid down first to fully protect the underlying running surface from heavy machinery. * **The Dirt:** Promoters have to source, transport, and lay roughly 3,500 to 4,000 tonnes of specialised shale or granite mix. * **Safety Equipment:** You need to hire and install FIM-regulated air fences, starter gates, referee communication systems, and track-grading machinery (tractors and bowsers) for the weekend. * **The Tear-Down:** After the meeting, every single grain of shale has to be meticulously removed and the stadium pressure-washed back to pristine condition. ### 2. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Rights & Sanction Fees (£500,000 – £800,000) To host a round of the FIM Speedway Grand Prix, a local promoter or council must pay a substantial staging fee to the global rights holders, WBD Sports. * This fee secures the calendar slot, television production rights, and covers the base prize money fund for the 16 competing riders. ### 3. Stadium Hire, Staffing, and Temporary Infrastructure (£400,000 – £600,000) Alexander Stadium’s permanent capacity sits at 18,000. While that is solid, a flagship British GP usually aims for higher numbers. * **Temporary Seating:** If a promoter wants to temporarily scale up capacity (Alexander Stadium can technically be expanded up to 40,000 using temporary grandstands), the hire cost sits around £100 per temporary seat. Adding even 5,000 temporary seats can quickly add £500,000 to the bill. * **Staffing & Overheads:** Hundreds of turnstile operators, stewards, medical personnel, and specialized track staff are needed, alongside the cost of hiring the stadium itself from Birmingham City Council. > **The Financial Catch:** Unlike a permanent venue (like Cardiff's Principality Stadium, which can absorb immense costs due to its 70,000-seat potential), Alexander Stadium has a lower financial ceiling. A promoter would need to guarantee packed-out stands and high-tier ticket pricing just to cover the upfront costs of transforming an athletics track into a world-class shale circuit. 👆 ai

Somewhere like the Alexander Stadium in Birmingham might be the right size and even Nigel Tolley was talking of moving the Brummies there... but then he is completely mad 🎩

It was announced at the Manchester GP that Monster are running some kind of 3 round series within the series for the Polish GP's, I didn't pick up on all the details. And of course BSI ran some kind of "Super Prix" back in the noghties, the richest 60 seconds in motorsport or something, was that for £100k Benfield Sports International (BSI) did run a massive cash-prize gimmick in the noughties, and it is the exact reason why that specific "richest minute" phrase exists. The event was the **2007 German Speedway Grand Prix**, held at the Veltins-Arena in Gelsenkirchen on October 13, 2007. BSI heavily promoted it because it marked the **100th Grand Prix** since the SGP series took over from the old one-off World Finals. To celebrate the milestone, BSI put up a staggering **$100,000 cash prize** strictly for the winner of the Grand Prix final. Because a standard four-lap final takes roughly 60 seconds, BSI’s entire marketing campaign for the meeting billed that specific race as **"The Richest Minute in Sport."** Here is how that dramatic night actually played out: * **The Track Farce:** The event became infamous for all the wrong reasons. The temporary track laid inside the football stadium began disintegrating almost immediately during practice and the early heats, with massive ruts and chunks of shale flying up. * **The Delayed Drama:** The track was deemed so dangerous that the meeting had to be completely abandoned on Saturday night and re-staged the following afternoon (Sunday, October 14). * **The Winner:** After all the chaos, the legendary **Andreas Jonsson** won the re-staged final, successfully pocketing the $100,000 cheque for his 60 seconds of work. He beat Greg Hancock, Jason Crump, and Leigh Adams to the line. While the actual event in Germany was a bit of a logistical nightmare for BSI, the marketing line worked so well that the "richest 60 seconds" tagline stuck around in speedway media and broadcasting for years afterward.

So I understand, nobody involved in that episode covered themselves in glory, silence all round, the fans deserved and explanation from somebody. The club and/or Ellis

And don't forget he buggered off from Birmingham after a month with no explanation

Remind me, who took the decision to run SWC at Warsaw Stadium, WBD or Mayfield?

Harry is not serious about his love for the sport... he'll say anything for a brown envelope full of readies. NOTICE: People stop calling for 'Arry to do stuff, it's quite clear it was a one off publicity stunt to try and keep TNT Sport on board, you may as well ask Linda Lusardi to step in and have a word... if you're having a joke, of course fill your boots 👍

Instead of renaming competitions, they could think about mandating all clubs run a junior team and give these kids some bike and track time! I'm not keen on him myself... but that's great 👍The sport needs these marmite characters... or just characters would be a start.

Seems strange that they've not done a double header with this, an SWC and a SGP round 🤷‍♂️

We got some lovely shots of the ground though 😂

Not good enough! You should resign! I'm afraid we're going to need to destroy your life... it is 2026 afterall 😉

Reading that article it seems that they convert the stadium for a "summer season" including rock concerts and other event's so that "conversion cost" could be spread with other events during the summer and wouldn't be borne by Speedway alone maybe? It does sound like a non-starter though

Surely, it's simple economics with the East Stand, with back of the fag packet workings if the East Stand holds 2,000 and costs £500,000 that adds £25 per ticket to a crowd of 6,500 per night, if it's run over 1 night, £50, that means my South Stand ticket this year would have been more like £100 instead of the £64.50 it actually was. When my last Cardiff ticket cost me £23 and I can go to any meeting at the NSS and watch Speedway of the highest standard for £25 do I want to pay £100 to watch a GP round, possibly in the rain, in the slums of Manchester (😉) with riders who can't even be @rsed to acknowledge the crowd 🤔

It's almost the perfect venue, it's the right shape for starters, it's in London, placed in a better location than Wembley, really easy to get to, with a lower capacity than Wembley & Cardiff. The reasons why not, there's only 14 operational tracks in the UK these days, when BSI took the "gamble" of taking the British GP to Cardiff in 2001 there were at least 24 operational tracks in the UK. Brandon was selling out at about 12,000 (with a lot of Poles attending) and the move to Cardiff really did spark a boom in the whole GP series with more rounds being introduced and also rounds being held in "destination" cities, there'd be no Copenhagen, Ullevi, Stockholm, Warsaw etc without Cardiff but they're all gone now. Maybe they need to go backwards in order to move forwards and reduce the number of rounds back to 6 or 7 at more prestige city destinations... oh and there's no roof 😁

The talent pool was spread much wider in those days thanks to the number of tracks, so if you did have talent, it was much easier to achieve a higher average. Now with only 6 teams in the top league that "talent" is now much more compacted meaning it's far harder to achieve such an average as Lee did and also unfortunately many more of the riders in today's field will never get anywhere near a career out of the sport.

He's not ready to be a Premiership number 1, he's averaging 6.49 this season but bizarrely his GSA has increased from 7.05 to 7.49! Musielak averaging 8, rolling GSA 6.40 Something ain't right with the way they're working these averages out!

23 races done in 2 hours at Manchester on Friday and Saturday (with riders using a new tyre for every race)... couldn't believe they didn't have a kids race though 😉

They weren't in the BSN app either

Just the 35 minutes to run the last 2 races, including a 20 minute gap between heat 20 and the semi 👏 Mind, the crowd were right royally entertained with a kids race, the riders picking their gates, before the semi only, something the GP series kicked into touch about 20 years ago... and a full rendition of The Final Countdown 👌 Well done to Coops, and (through gritted teeth 😬) Wayne Jarvis for making the correct decision to award the final. And for those that weren't counting, the word "tassels" was disappointingly only said the 6 times 😁

I don't think it is though without the East Stand, isn't that why they're held back to back? Mind you, weren't Cardiff and Manchester both originally on the calendar for last year? I dread to think what the Manchester ticket prices would have been if it were a stand alone GP.

What was Hodder excluded for there, officially? Surely it could have only been for unfair riding?