27/12/2017
Sky Sports and BT Sport have finally reached agreement to allow open access to all their satellite channels for all their subscribers. Whatever happens in the negotiations with BT Sport over broadcasting Premiership League racing, this definitely means that British Speedway will be broadcast live on Sky Sports next season….albeit that currently the only confirmed […]
13/08/2015
Like the speedway equivalent of Frazer from Dad’s Army, last week Philip Rising – Managing Editor of the Speedway Star – once again used an opinion column in the pages of his publication to warn about the “ills” and future of British Speedway in its current form/configuration (with especial emphasis upon the travails of the […]
01/01/2015
Fans who wish to savour the statistics of the Speedway World Championship continue to be very badly served by both the F.I.M and the Speedway Grand Prix series current commercial rights holders and organisers BSI Speedway (an IMG company). Both continue to choose not to publish official attendance figures for SGP series events. The F.I.M. […]
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 […]
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 […]
31/01/2010
Attendance figures for the 2008 and 2009 Speedway Grand Prix (SGP) series have finally been released from where they’d been held in a file marked ‘Top Secret’ inside the BSI/IMG bunker located on the outskirts of London. A quick first glance indicates that the SGP World Championship outlook remains cloudy and its popularity with fans […]
26/07/2009
For those of us outside the charmed circle of speedway bigwigs and journalists who receive press releases from the BSI Press Office, we have to suffice with the thin informational pickings provided by the cleans whiter than white SGP website. Occasionally the SGP Press Officer, Philip Rising, selectively responds to real or imagined comments about […]
24/04/2009
The new series of the Speedway Grand Prix is about to get underway but, arguably, finds the glamour of its start marred by cost-cutting, secrecy and prevarication. Sadly, the fanfare over the arrival of a new website for the Speedway Grand Prix fails to paper over the vexatious issues and unanswered questions that still beset […]
15/01/2009
Widely seen as the man with the real brainpower in the team of all talents that makes up the BSI management team, Paul ‘Really Important’ Bellamy (Managing Director BSI) has kindly deigned to be savagely quizzed on the SGP (including the Gelsenkirchen fiasco) in this week’s Speedway Star. Billed on the front cover of the […]
18/10/2008
The Daily Mail has wholeheartedly joined the Internet age with various blogs on its website and, quite amazingly, one of these is dedicated to speedway! It’s called Speedway from Skezza with a masthead that features a photograph of a youthful looking member of the newspaper staff. Albeit one with an irksome matey nickname, gel in […]
03/10/2008
Given that the Speedway Star and the Speedway Grand Prix appear wedded at the hip, it’s astonishing to read some reasonably strong criticism of this event within its pages (both on September 13th as well as the subsequent meeting report on September 20th). Let alone to find that the chief critic is Philip Rising! Beyond […]