Speedway (or Motorcycle Speedway) is four motorcycles with no brakes and only a single gear, on a loose surface, oval track of between 260 and 425metres long over four anti-clockwise laps. It's fast, furious and brilliant fun and my Mother loves it!
There appears to be much debate about the origins of the sport with records showing races held pre-first world war in the US and Australia but it really began to develop in the 1920s in New Zealand and Australia before coming to the UK in 1928 and reaching a peak as a spectator sport in the 1950s.
Today, Speedway is mostly popular in Northern and Western Europe, not so much in Australia and North America but there are still meetings there. In the UK, there are still quite a few dirt or shale ovals but the number of circuits and regular meetings has diminished over the years. My Mum's love of Speedway came from family trips to Odsal stadium in Bradford when she was young in the 1950s, and that's where she took me when I was a kid too as well as an occasional trip to the King of Speedway tracks at Belle Vue, Manchester.
Incredible crowd at Odsal Stadium, Bradford. Also home to Bradford Northern Rugby League club
The Bikes
Weigh no less than 77 kg (unfuelled)
Use a four-stroke, single-cylinder engine with one carburettor and one spark plug and a maximum displacement capacity of 500cc
Have guards fitted over moving engine parts where reasonable
Use an additional chain guard to prevent a hand or fingers being cut at the nip point where the chain meets the sprocket by a chain
Have a peg (Dutch Peg) fitted to prevent a broken primary chain flailing and injuring a rider or a fellow competitor
Use shatter-resistant plastics where reasonable
Be fitted with a dirt deflector
Be fuelled by methanol with no additives
Be fitted with an approved silencer
Have a handlebar width greater than 650 mm and less than 850 mm.
What appealed to junior Nathen though was the skidding around corners! When the bikes hit the curve the back wheel skids out and opposite lock is applied to the handlebars.
It was drifting, before drifting became a thing and I often attempted to reproduce the effect on my bicycle except physics thwarted the attempt to recreate the effect simply by the fact that when you stopped pedalling to put your foot down, the bicycle slowed and you couldn't skid. So what we did was, find some rough tracks, pedal like hell and then jammed on the back break hard to skid the back wheel whilst turning at the same time.
I was the champion in my street but it didn't impress my parents when I regularly pushed my bike home having worn through and burst yet another tire and innertube. Pocket money had to be used to pay for new tyres and tubes!
The Circuits
The Ovals were often multi-use, with Stockcar and Banger racing also taking place there, again, on family caravan holidays to Great Yarmouth as a kid, a highlight of the holiday would always be a trip to the twice-weekly Stockcar racing meetings.
Speedway is still considered a team event where riders from the same club compete against other clubs and there is a league system in place to determine the winning team after a season. During a meeting, a rider will race a number of times, the winner getting 3 points, 2nd place - 2 points, 3rd place - 1 point and zero points for finishing last, being disqualified or falling off! Points are totalled and the winning team obviously has the most points with a bonus being given to the individual with the most points over the course of the evening.
Although there are still leagues and meets all over the world, there is no World Championship any longer, the last World Championship was held in Poland in 2017 and I cannot find any info on future events which is rather sad.
My hero of the Speedway as a kid was a New Zealander called Ivan Mauger who rode for a number of British Teams including Hull whom he was riding for when I saw him ride at a meeting at Odsal in the late '70s. My Mum loved him!
The great Ivan Mauger (picture is used under Creative Commons license and attributed to Lawson Speedway - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7300428)
Speedway has it all. True grassroots motorsport with all the associated crashes, fights and drama as you can see in the following Youtube clip which is genuinely well worth a watch for all the spills and thrills and some very funny moments too!
Speedway is still on Sky Sports or Eurosports from time to time and with my Mum's newfound satellite TV education and subscription to Sky Sports, she can work out how to find the Speedway on the more obscure sports channels and even hit the record button on the program planner. I don't think she's worked out how to play it back later yet though as whenever I go home, there are pages of unwatched Speedway, Tennis and Boxing programs!
Hope you enjoyed reading and seeing the clips. Thank you :-)