Birmingham Post

I'm taiking about speedway. The Birmingham Brummies, whose previous incarnation gave up the ghost in 1986, will stage their first meeting of the season at Perry Barr Greyhound Stadium on Wednesday March 21 - and you know what? I just might be there.
Now generally, motorsport leaves me stone cold. I have absolutely no desire to pay several hundred pounds to watch Jenson Button whizz by 65 times at 200mph, before sitting in a traffic jam for four hours on the way home.
The same applies to motorcycling's Valentino Rossi, rallying's Markus Gronholm or even the Touring Cars Championship which has given Stourbridge racer Matt Neal national recognition - yet there's something about speedway that I like.
Maybe it's the fact that my neighbour when I was a teenager in Kidderminster was a Cradley Heathens fan. He and his dad would go on for hours about how this was proper grassroots sport and, eventually, he offered to take me to see a meeting at the Heathens' Dudley Wood stadium.
Maybe it's the non-league football fan in me, but I think he was right.
Put four men on motorbikes (of exactly the same specification, so it's the skill of the man on the bike that counts, not that of the geeks in the pits with spanners, screwdrivers and computers); line them up, lift the starting tape, tell them to let the clutch out and watch them fly round four laps of a 400-metre long track at roughly 60mph - with no brakes.
In most team meetings, there are between 13 and 16 heats, with two riders per team in each heat. The first man past the post after four laps gets three points, second gets two points, third gets one, last gets nothing. And those, basically, are the rules.
There are three divisions in British speedway and, as if in keeping with the standing of most sport in the West Midlands these days, the Brummies will be in the second of them, the Premier League.
Like its' football counterpart, the second division is where you'll mainly find English riders, the top-flight Elite League being the home of the top Scandinavian and American riders who generally dominate the sport.
Unlike most other motorsports, you are close enough to the action to get a sustained sense of the speed and danger involved - especially when the riders fight for the same square inch of shale and one or both career headlong into the safety fence.
Then, there's the smell. Burgers and chips mixed with motorcycle fuel....you have to be there, believe me.
I'll grant you that, on television, speedway can look formulaic - just four blokes flying around a track; yet speedway, like all the best sport, is not intended for television; the atmosphere, the craic, the smell, are the best thing about it.
I haven't been to speedway since Cradley closed in the late-1980s (Dudley Wood is now a housing estate), but I just might give it a go this summer. If, in these days of sanitised, over-hyped sporting experiences, you're after something true to the proper spirit of sport, I suggest you do too.