22/11/2014
The Speedway Grand Prix rider earnings table for 2014 makes interesting reading as Greg Hancock sneaks ahead of Nicki Pedersen in the overall 2005-2014 total earnings table by just $4,350. The Top 10 Speedway Grand Prix Riders judged by their earnings from 2005 to 2014 are as follows: Greg Hancock $657,150 Nicki Pedersen $652,800 […]
08/12/2013
Latest figures reveal that the FIM Speedway Grand Prix series average attendances continued to fall in 2012 and 2013, despite the ‘blip’ poor results of 2011. Worse still, SGP series continues to decline in popularity at most series event venues and overall. This isn’t really a great surprise – since 2002 the trend remains one […]
14/08/2013
It’s a really tough job to learn anything of value or gain insights from Speedway Grand Prix reports on its website or in trade press reports, let alone any SGP programme. That said, though not an exact science, the ongoing declining popularity of the Speedway Grand Prix is, perhaps, further laid bare by recent […]
04/02/2013
The good news is that the 2012 FIM Monster Energy Speedway World Cup finally halted the ongoing precipitous decline of the Speedway World Cup television audience on Sky Sports. The international big name sponsorship of Monster Energy was extensively trailed and hailed as the dynamic future by themselves, the speedway trade press and rights holders […]
06/07/2012
The reverse Midas touch BSI repeatedly show via the ongoing decline of their Speedway Grand Prix television audience on Sky Sports looks like an outlandish success story in contrast to the rapid collapse of viewer interest in the Speedway World Cup. Looking at the publicly available figures for 2006-2011, popularity has gone from robust to […]
17/06/2012
This week BSI managing director Paul Bellamy announced ‘news’ that 2013 will see Speedway Grand Prix staged in yet another stadium that they’ll fail to fill anywhere near capacity (in this instance the brand new 50,000 seater Friends Arena in Stockholm). In trademark his usual breathless specious fashion, Mr Bellamy claimed “Speedway fans should be […]
17/11/2011
After all the hype and what feels like the relentless season long cheerleading opinion from the notionally ‘independent’ in the media, the 2011 Speedway Grand Prix series attendance figures throw into yet sharper relief the ongoing credibility crisis with paying customers that organisers BSI/IMG continue to fail to acknowledge, resolve or address. Instead they prefer […]
05/10/2011
The Polish Ekstraliga in 2012 will operate a rule to limit each team to only one Speedway Grand Prix rider per team. Therefore, any rider offered a wild card for the 2012 Speedway Grand Prix should – for financial reasons – turn down the opportunity to ride in the SGP series. If, indeed, career earnings […]
03/06/2011
We’ve waited many years for the Sky Sports Speedway publicity department to stir themselves enough to explore synergies with other Rupert Murdoch owned News International sister companies and persuade them to properly cover speedway. It would also be lovely to find decent column inches on British speedway in the sports pages of the News of […]
29/04/2011
With the 2011 Speedway Grand Prix series about to flare back into life this weekend in Leszno, BSI ramped up the excitement still further with a series of thrilling announcements. Hot on the heels of an email that contained such awesomely important SGP & SWC news that its subject header had to be typed out […]
29/12/2010
Rider 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Total Jason Crump $64,750 $81,400 $60,850 $73,400 $101,600 $67,700 $449,700 Andreas Jonsson $43,650 $55,000 $143,350 $51,960 $58,550 $55,350 $407,860 Nicki Pedersen $51,900 $59,950 $88,150 $83,100 $54,650 $53,300 $391,050 Tomasz Gollob $44,550 $48,900 $61,050 $75,000 $72,650 $84,800 $386,950 Greg Hancock $45,650 $61,750 $59,750 $69,400 $60,200 $54,750 $351,500 Hans Andersen […]
09/12/2010
After (allegedly) the most exciting Speedway Grand Prix series since the dawn of time, the ‘high’ quality of the racing product appears to have little impact at the turnstiles. A quick glance at the official F.I.M. figures for each venue recently published in Polish magazine Tygodnik Zuzlowy reveals that overall attendances remain more or less […]
22/10/2010
Unusually, the permanent wildcards selected for the 2011 Speedway Grand Prix actually look surprisingly sensible choices. This hasn’t always been the case and the performance record of those permanent wildcards selected by the powers that be has often been spotty. Much more significantly, their performances have been historically worse than those riders who qualified for […]
15/10/2010
The last Speedway Grand Prix of the 2010 season finds Nigel and Kelvin trackside for Sky Sports at Bydgoszcz. As usual the excessive number of rounds of the SGP format ensures – like so many years previously – that there is absolutely no mystery about who will be world champion well before the so-called climax […]
11/04/2010
People say that the sports programming shown exclusively on Sky Sports has historically been the real engine of subscriber and revenue growth for the Rupert Murdoch owned Sky satellite channel. Premiership football has definitely driven many people to sign up with Sky Sports who otherwise wouldn’t have done so and, if its boosters and/or press […]