At last the better weather is beginning to kick in, although having said that we were washed out on Wednesday 28th! Track preparation has gone really well with race times tumbling, mainly courtesy of William Lawson who has now reduced the seasons best time to 54.8, only 0.2 sec from Theo Piper's track record. Must be doing something right.
Our last two meetings were against Scunthorpe - somewhat disappointing performance from their ex-Elite League heatleaders but mainly due to a superb performance from the Monarchs, in particular William and Andrew Tully with full maximums and Matthew Wethers with a paid max. The result was a record win margin in the Armadale era from one of the few occasions we have been able to track a full-strength side due to under-21 and other commitments.
On Friday 30th we welcomed the Redcar Bears on KO Cup business, having won at Redcar the previous evening. There was some very good hard but mostly fair racing. An unusual happening occurred when our young Australian, Aaron Summers took a severe dislike to the third bend fence boards when trying the outside run on a rather loose and deep dirt line which had built up. There then followed a struggle to disentangle a board which had somehow got a metal fence post embedded in its corner. Eventually after the use of various metal implements it was persuaded to let go and the meeting carried on
Roll on Flaming June
Cheers
Ian
Greetings from the sunny North. Main task this week has been repairs to fence posts and re-tensioning wires as a result of several excursions into the boards. This also resulted in a shortage of spare fence panels so my main task on Friday was painting six new boards in our blue and gold colours just in case we had a run on (or into) them.
Congratulations are due to our Starting Marshall, Jim Syme who has been selected to preside over the start line shennanigans at the British G.P. at the Millennium Stadium. I rather doubt if Jim will have to sweep the inside line at Cardiff!
The meeting itself against IOW was a bit one-sided the highlight being a full 21 point return from "Awesome" Andrew Tully including a race time of 55.3, only 0.7 sec outside the track record. This is the first full 21 point maximum I personally have witnessed in my many years of watching speedway, although George Hunter was, I believe paid for 21 at Coatbridge in 1968.
More later
Best regards
PS Following your revealation as a Bert Harkins fan I have attached a little extra for you. I also admire your taste in Ove Fundin (all time no. 1) and Rune Holta, following the superb Norwegian speedway tradition from such as Sverre Harrfeldt, Reidar Eide, Oyvind S. Berg and many others
