Speedway: the sport that's fast, furious — and on the brink of fading away

I wouldn’t say I was a speedway fan, exactly. Or rather, I wouldn’t say I was a speedway superfan. However, having watched the Glasgow Tigers race on two occasions – once at Armadale, the basecamp of their arch rivals the Edinburgh Monarchs, and once at Ashfield, their home ground on Hawthorne Street, equidistant between Springburn and Possilpark – I do get it. 

For the uninitiated: speedway is a sport in which brakeless 500cc motorbikes rip around dirt tracks spewing shale dust into the air and making the sky smell like methanol. The bikes emit a Spitfire-like strafing sound and accelerate faster than Formula One cars. Quite frequently, they crash. Sometimes, if the wreck is really bad, medics will rush onto the track to treat or retrieve the injured rider. True speedway fans are fanatical about this spectacle. The fear, the filth, the fury. They love it. And few teams have a following more fanatical than that of the Glasgow Tigers. 

Paul Honthy is a track curator at Ashfield. Together with a small crew, he regulates the specific mix of shale and clay that forms the primary layer of all professional speedway circuits. Perched on the edge of a couch in a construction cabin on the east side of the stadium – the cabin doubles as a medical dock – Paul rhapsodises to me about his chosen sport. Or about the sport that chose him.

“Friday nights, summertime, floodlights, up in the pits, the noise vibrating, and the shale; we have fans who love standing in the bends and getting hit by the shale; they hold up a pint glass and a third of the pint is full of shale; that’s what the fans want; there are very few sports where you can get as close as you can here; on top of that, when the guys crash, when the boys hit the bags, they have broken necks, broken backs, but then they’ll be back like six weeks later.” 

Broken necks. Broken backs. When the boys hit the bags. Paul is right: proximity is a big part of the appeal. On a frigid Friday evening at Armadale, I stood ten feet away from the track, watching the shale fly and the bikes roar by. At Ashfield — where the facilities are more advanced and the safety features more robust; Tigers fans call Armadale “Armadump” — I got even closer to the action, all but resting my elbows on the security fences during the fourth and fifth heats.

Armadale and Ashfield were the first two matches of the season, aggregate legs of the long-running Scottish Cup. Over 30 heats, Glasgow won, amassing 91 points to Edinburgh’s 89. In speedway, there are 15 heats per match, two riders per team, four riders per heat, and four laps per heat. Each heat, stoppages notwithstanding, is rarely more than 60 seconds long. Speedway circuits run counter-clockwise and points are awarded in sequence: three for first place, two for second, one for third, none for last.

Speedway is a lot of things: violent, theatrical, absurd. But it is never sectarian. On match days, families and fans intermingle freely.