Speedway (Speedway)

Member Name: rossmoorlock

Product:	Speedway
Date:	10/04/01 (3981 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent Sport

Disadvantages: Not well known

Speedway is a sport that is becoming more and more popular each year in Britain. It is now the second most popular spectator sport, but yet still most of you will never have watched it or even heard of it. I have been a speedway fan since I was about 3. My dad has always been a speedway fan and his father took him to speedway matches many years ago. It is hard to explain the buzz that you get from actually being at a speedway match. The engine noises echoing and roaring around the stadium is incredible but the smell of the bikes is something that creates the best atmosphere of all. Speedway is something that I will carry on watching until I die, and I know that I will always enjoy it. I will take my children to speedway and would hope that they would take theirs, as everybody deserves to have the experiences of Speedway that I have had.


I am sure that some of you have heard of speedway but are not really sure what it is. This is understandable; as it is hardly ever in the papers and has only recently been showed live on sky sports television.
Speedway is a motorcycling sport and can be taken part on dirt tracks, ice tracks or grass tracks. I am going to tell you a bit about dirt track speedway, as this is by far the most popular in the United Kingdom.


There are currently three dirt track leagues at the moment. There is the Elite league, which is the equivalent of the premiership. There is the Premier League, which is the equivalent of the first division and then there is the Conference League, which is the bottom league.
There are about ten teams in each league and each team has seven riders in it. The riders will vary in skill as two of them will be reserves and obviously not quite as good as the top riders in the team. Each rider has a point average, which is the average number of points he scores in a meeting.

There are teams from all over England and Scotland in places like Ipswich, Belle Vue, Oxford, Poole, Covent
ry, Peterbourough, Eastbourne, King's Lynn, Wolverhampton, Exeter, Stoke, Glasgow, Swindon, Sheffield, Hull, Berwick, Isle Of Wight, Essex, Edinburgh, Worthington, Newcastle, Newport and many many more. At all of these places they have a some kind of stadium and a track. The tracks vary quite a lot. Some will be very long and some will be very short. Exeter has a very large track where riders can get up to about 90mph. This benefits Exeter a lot, as most other riders will be scared if over taking at such high speeds but Exeter are used to it so they tend to win their home matches by large amounts. But if a team like Exeter then went to race at the Isle of Wight they would struggle as the track is very small there.


Well I have now told you a bit about the teams so I will now try and tell you a bit about matches/meetings and what kind of rules there are.
Speedway matches take place on a regular basis, about one or two a week for each team.
Each match is done in two halves. Eg Exeter has a home match against Stoke and win 53-37 then they have to go race away at Stoke and lose 50-40. The two scores are added together so Exeter would win 93-87 on aggregate. They would get thee points for this as in speedway you get two points for a match win and an extra bonus point for the aggregate win.
There are fifteen heats in each speedway match and each heat has four riders in it. (Two from each team) To make it easier for the spectators and other riders to work out who is who on the track one of the home team riders wears a blue helmet and one wears a red helmet, and the away team riders wear either yellow and black or white. So in one race you will have four riders wearing blue, red, white and yellow and black helmets.
Each race is four laps of the track and is started by a tape that goes up. All four riders go right up to the tape, rev up their engines, the tape is lifted and then the race is in their own hands.
The points are scored as
followed...

1st place- 3 points
2nd place- 2 points
3rd place- 1 point
4th place- 0 points

So a team can win a heat by 5-1 4-2 or draw it 3-3. Sometimes riders get excluded for falling off and therefore and not put in for the rerun of the race so a team can therefore win a heat by a bigger margin.
There are ninety points to be won in each speedway match and the biggest ever margin was recorded last year when Exeter when a speedway match 75-15, which meant that they had won every heat 5-1.


At every match there will be a match referee. He normally sits in a box at the tp of the stadium so that he can look down on the track and see exactly what is going on. If there is an accident there match referee has to decide who is to blame and whether anybody should be disqualified or not. Sometimes the decisions that he makes are not very good, as he only sees it once and doesn't get to see a replay of it. There is a phone in the riders pits that links up to the referee box, so that if they are not happy with a referee's decision they can argue it out with him.


Speedway is not a very violent sport but I have been at mathces where riders have been fighting together. It can sometimes get very bad, as all the team members join in and there is nothing that anybody can do to try and stop it. The worst ever vilolence shown in speedway was live on sky sports television. A race had started and on the second lap there was a coming together of two riders. The two riders fell over, one got up ok but the other stayed down injured. The rider that was ok walked off back to the pits but the injured rider stayed down, received a bit of treatment but he looked very angry. He felt that he had been knocked over on purpose by the other rider.
The injured rider walked back to the pits and live in television punched the other rider and knocked him out for the count.
In a way I suppose that this is the kind of publicisity
that people want for speedway as it will make more people watch it, but speedway shouldn't be shown like this as it will only give it a bad reputation.


Speedway bikes are quite basic, as obviously the lighter they are the quicker the riders can go. They only have one gear, and can go up to about 90 mph on a long track. The set-up for the bikes changes for each track they are ridden on. So the set-up of a bike would be different for a short track compared to a long track, as on a long track the bike would need to have more speed. Each speedway rider has at least one mechanic who travels around with them and each rider also has a van to keep their bikes in so that they can travel to matches easily.
All speedway riders have more then one bike, as there is always the problem of engine damage or something going wrong on the bike, and as they are trying to earn a living they always need a spare bike.


Although there are quite a lot of full time speedway riders, most of the riders in the lower divisions have another job to keep a steady income. Speedway can be very unpredictable as matches are called off because of rain. Speedway riders are paid for each point they get in a race. In the Elite league they get paid something like £75 a point and if you think that the best riders will get about fifteen points a match then the pay is not really that bad, but they do have to pay for bike repairs and some travel expenses themselves, which can sometimes be a lot of money.
For the other leagues some riders are not even paid but if they are it is only £25 a point, which is not really that much if you think about the risks that they are taking.


Although there are not that many deaths in speedway there are a lot of nasty injuries every week. Broken legs and broken collar bones are probably the two most common injuries, but some riders chose to ride with broken bones because they really need the money and don't want to lose the
ir team position. I have seen many nasty accidents but at every speedway match, there are two ambulances present and always a doctor there too. A match is cancelled if both the ambulances are taking riders to hospital. Recently the death of a speedway rider has shocked everybody around Britain. Simon Wigg (wiggy) who recently died of a brain tumour was well known by everybody. I have seen him race on many occasions and he was one of speedways true characters. He has been world long track champion and still had many years left in him. He had a few nasty speedway accidents where he had banged his head, which then later results in the brain tumour that took his life. He is a rider that will never be forgotten by the speedway world and this is just a warning of how dangerous speedway actually is.


About 25 years ago accidents were a lot more frequent in speedway, as the safety barriers were not very strong and crowd protection was very poor. In some matches spectators were killed when bikes had flown over the barriers and had landed in the crowds. There were a number of tragedies like this and this made tracks and speedway officials tighten up safety and now speedway is becoming less of a risk to everybody.


I am sure that quite a few of you have been watching speedway on sky sports television. They only started showing it at the start of last years season and it was a great success. Speedway was publicised a lot more and now has a lot more followers then ever before. The coverage was excellent but they only showed matches from the Elite League, which sparked off a few angry supporters for the lower teams. I am an Exeter Falcons fan and they are in the Premier League so therefore were not shown on television at all last year, which I found to be very annoying. This year things are changing though. Due to the large demand some speedway matches from the lower divisions are going to be shown live on Sky Sports TV.


Most of the fairly
large teams are now going on to the internet and all have very good web sites. These are very good, as you can find out fixtures, rider information and quickly find out whether matches have been cancelled or not. I am currently signed on to the Exeter Falcons website and I receive daily news letters from here and these are very helpful, as they tell me results and match reports as well as injuries and all of the latest gossip. I think that bringing speedway on to the internet is the next step of making speedway known all over Britain.
The nest step has to be getting more speedway shown on television and advertising speedway as a whole a lot better.


There is a speedway magazine for the supporters, which has been running for many years. It is an excellent magazine and follows all types of speedway all over the world. This is really good magazine for those who are interested in speedway but also for those who want to get involved with it but don't really know where to start. It costs £2.20 and is available from most newsagents but some may not stock in, as demand may not be that high in some areas.
If you want to get interested in speedway then I am sure that there will be a speedway stadium and team near you. Just ask around a bit and somebody will know about it. If you are worried about the price of it all then I think that you will be quite surprised. For an adult a ticket is about £7.50 and for a child it can be anything from about £1 to £5. This is a lot cheaper then any football match so why not go and support your local team.


I am sure that none of you are aware of the fact that we have a brand new British World Champion in Mark Loram. He road all over the world last year in world champion heats against all the best riders from around the world. This was very poorly publicised, as it was in no large newspapers and hardly anybody was made aware of the fact that we have a new world champion.
Although speedway is becomi
ng a lot more popular, it still has a long way to go before it becomes a household name like football.

Summary: