The Saturday briefing

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

- by CAROLINE FORD

Is there anything you're yearning to know? Send your questions, on any subject, to the contacts given below, and we will do our best to answer them...

How many speedway clubs have folded since it was introduced to this country. Stoke recently folded after the track site was sold.

Nat Reid, Manchester

Speedway was once reckoned to be the UK’s second most popular spectator sport and from the end of the Second World War to 1981, races were often held in front of tens of thousands of fans.

Speedway involves four riders on single-gear motorbikes, negotiating an oval circuit up to 70mph in an anticlockwise direction, crucially with no brakes.

Each race lasts around a minute and the 500cc bikes could leave a Formula 1 car trailing off the start.

Australia is cited as hosting one of the earliest speedway meetings in 1923 although “dirt track” races were held before the First World War in the US.

In 1905 motorcycle racing was held at the Newcastle NSW Rugby Ground but the first official British speedway meeting was at High Beech in Epping Forest in 1928, in front of around 30,000 spectators.

By the end of 1928, there were more than fifty race tracks in the UK. Speedway’s popularity began to decline in the mid-1980s, particularly after the loss of mainstream television coverage.