Hard to believe in an age where almost every available inch of rider, bike, pit crew and safety fence is festooned with logos, but there was a time when speedway riders were a blank canvas. Who in those pioneering days would have guessed that a speedway backside not only offers a soft landing but is a prime advertising spot?
A time when official team titles – Belle Vue, Arena Essex and Mildenhall’s Fen Tigers apart – consisted of two words, often alliterative.
Sponsorship is a vital lifeline for a sport which in modern times has become as much a test of the wallet as ability and riders can earn a lucrative contract by virtue of their ability to wear the right cap at the right time! Team names, racesuits, spoilers, helmets, bike covers , even the arenas themselves all become high speed billboards.
But sponsorship used to be a much more low key business, a set of leathers here, maybe an engine, helmet or bike cover – a job for the summer on the fishing boats perhaps, but little or no fanfare
Second-halves were an opportunity for a local business to sponsor a trophy and get a name check when handing it over. The odd rider began to adorn leathers with sponsors names – usually just one. Mike Hiftle produced a set of white and blue leathers where the name of his sponsor went up the left-hand side and the down the right! Dave Gifford for reasons that escape me had a natty set sponsored by Smiths Crisps, even though Berwick was very firmly a Tudor town.
Subtle they weren’t and definitely clear of anyone with even one artistic eye.
That all changed in the late 1970s when Infradex – apparently a southern-based portable heater company of that vintage – announced its sponsorship of the entire Rye House team, kitting all seven riders out in matching red and white leathers emblazoned with the company name.
Speedway was just coming out of the dark ages as far as leathers were concerned with top riders starting to add a splash of colour to the sport. There had been exceptions such as the White Ghost Ken Le Breton and Red Devil Frank Varey but by and large black had been the new black.
Not for the first time Ivan Mauger led the way with his custom-made leathers. One of his most famous sets – on display when he brought his gold-plated Jawa to Shielfield in 1975 – was white complete with Exeter Falcons’ name and logo etched in green – the forerunner to modern day team race suits.
That evening Ivan was the icing on the cake at the annual Bordernapolis meeting taking on Jim McMillan, then of Hull – and eventually a Bandit, in three match races, donning a different set of heavily sponsored leathers for each outing.
A year later the likes of Ted Hubbard, Brian Foote, Kelvin Mullarkey, Bob Garrad and Hughie Saunders were the ground-breakers.
Modern team sponsors expect naming rights and a prominent display on the race suit or body colour in return for backing. In the 70s that was not allowed resulting in Rye House and Infradex’s neat sidestep of the rules.
For once speedway was a trailblazer as only a few months earlier Southern League football side Kettering Town had been ordered, under threat of heavy fines by the Football Association, to remove the name of a local tyre company from the front of their shirts.
It would be three years before Hibs became the first British club to have officially sanctioned shirt sponsors and the rest of British sport followed.
Even then the BBC sniffily refused to allow sponsored shirts in games they screened forcing clubs to go “bare-chested” if they appeared on Match of the Day or Sportscene. Not for the first time the Beeb was guilty of hypocrisy as it was quite happy to broadcast the high speed cigarette billboards that were Formula 1 cars of the period, giving huge national exposure to the John Player Special Lotus, Marlboro McLaren and Lucky Strike Ford teams.
Mildenhall also appeared in matching team leathers although the Bog Moggies stuck to black with a yellow fringe but, rather daringly for the time, emblazoned each rider’s name on the backside.
Even the Bandits followed (racing) suit with a natty black and gold number around the same time.
Sponsors flocked to the sport, Drybrough and Federation Breweries giving vital financial backing to Berwick’s Berrington adventure in much the same way that Jewson and Keenwood Karpets are currently doing.
Down the road Newcastle’s domination of the National League was in part bankrolled by a lucrative deal with Lada cars – which also backed promoter Ian Thomas’ other team at Hull.
Federation cash even persuaded them to dump the Diamonds nickname and become the Federation Specials (a rather decent bitter only available in clubs of either workingmen or sporting persuasion!) for a couple of seasons.
The British League had Gulf Oil as its title sponsor, Volkswagen backed the short-lived domestic Grand Prix series, the Sunday Mirror sponsored internationals and World Finals while Durex’s backing of the National League Fours in the early 1980s produced the only speedway programme that had to be sneaked into the house in a plain brown wrapper.
Their sponsorship of the test series between England and the USA also inspired the most memorable national ad campaign to feature speedway as an action picture of Peter Collins – who also appeared in a background racing role in a Mars bar advert around the same time – along with the memorable tagline “Durex – the crowd stopper”.
While many of the sponsorships – especially after alcohol and cigarette advertising was banned towards the end of the 1990s – tended to be of a very local variety some were a little more left field. None more than the Wolverhampton Dianetics Wolves.
Dianetics was the brainchild of American science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard in the 1950s and at the heart of his controversial Church of Scientology. Little did LRH realise that three decades later he would paying the wages of Ronnie Corey, Carl Stonehewer, Sam Ermolenko and Bruce Cribb!
Then there were some that got away. During my days as a Rugby League journalist I reported that Salford (then known as the Red Devils) had been offered an eye-watering sum by satellite p*rn channel Red Hot Dutch to become their shirt sponsors. Eyebrows were raised and the Rugby Football League eventually blocked the deal as it did not fit with the sport’s family image.
They may just have had a point.
