Speedway: 500 cm³, no brakes, four riders on the cinders

Races & circuitsSpeedwayCinder oval

Speedway was born on the Australian ovals — first documented meeting on 15 December 1923 at West Maitland — before setting England alight on 19 February 1928 at High Beech, in front of thirty thousand onlookers. Its machine remains one of the most radical in motorcycle sport: a four-stroke 500 cm³ single running on pure methanol, around 75 horsepower, a single gear, no rear suspension and strictly no brakes for a minimum of 77 kilos. Four riders, four laps, some sixty seconds of controlled drift on crushed shale. From Wembley 1936 to the Speedway Grand Prix born in 1995, the world title today runs through Poland, Denmark and Sweden.

---

From the Australian ovals to the English stadiums

The story begins a long way from Europe. As early as 1905, motorcycles were already circling the 440-yard track of the Newcastle rugby ground, in New South Wales. But the first genuinely documented meeting of what would become speedway was held on 15 December 1923 at the West Maitland Showground, still in Australia, on a dirt oval traced in the middle of a showground field. Three years later, in 1926, the country staged its first national speedway championship at the Newcastle Showground, won by the American Cec Brown. The scene was set: an oval, dust, and motorcycles stripped of everything that doesn't make them accelerate.

The tipping point came in England. On 19 February 1928, a meeting organised by R. J. Hill-Bailey and the Ilford Motor Cycle Club at the High Beechcircuit, in Essex, drew around 30,000 spectators — the organisers had been hoping for ten times fewer. Two Australians, Billy Galloway and Keith McKay, had crossed the planet precisely to plant the discipline in the northern hemisphere. The bet was won in a single afternoon. Within a few seasons, speedway became a stadium sport, popular, urban, run in the evening under the floodlights: a path radically different from that of the road racers of the Tourist Trophy or the rebels of café racer culture who would set that same England alight thirty years later.

---

The machine: 500 cm³, methanol, zero brakes

A speedway bike is an exercise in subtraction. The FIM technical rules call for a four-stroke single of 500 cm³ maximum, one carburettor, one spark plug, fed on pure methanol, with no additives. That fuel allows a very high compression ratio and cools the combustion chamber: it is what makes it possible to extract around 75 horsepower from a single piston, for a minimum weight of 77 kg. By way of comparison, the 1998 Yamaha YZF-R1 claimed 150 horsepower, but for 177 kg dry: relative to weight, the oval single is still ahead.

The rest is stripping-down taken to the limit: a single gear in direct drive, the clutch there only to engage and disengage, no rear suspension, no starter — you push the machine to fire it up. And above all, the thing that defines the discipline in the eyes of the whole world: no brakes. Neither front nor rear. The rider slows down solely by shutting the throttle and putting the bike sideways. Which means the reflexes you pick up working a gearbox on the road are of strictly no use here.

Final drive is adjusted purely by changing the front and rear sprockets , depending on how much grip the track offers that evening. Two engine builders dominate the world scene: Italy's GM and the Czech Jawa, whose “laydown” units — cylinder strongly inclined forwards to lower the centre of gravity — power the vast majority of machines. With 75 horsepower for 77 kilos, a bike like that dispatches 0 to 100 km/h in about three seconds for a top speed of barely 130 km/h in a straight line: everything is decided in the acceleration and in the slide, never in outright speed.

🏍️ That oval-racing silhouette, wide bars and rear wheel sideways, is one of the finest images in motorcycle sport: find it framed in our motorcycle posters and prints.

---

Four riders, four laps, sixty seconds

Four riders, four laps, no brakes: speedway fits into a single sentence. Each heat (or “race”) pits four competitors against one another, running anticlockwise over four laps, barely sixty seconds or so of racing. The start is from a standstill, engine running, front wheel held behind an elastic tape stretched across the track: when the starter lifts it, everything is decided in fifty metres. Touching the tape before it flies up means immediate exclusion, and a rider is given a two-minute time allowance, counted down by the meeting referee, to present himself at the line.

The scoring is disarmingly simple: 3 points for the winner, 2 for second, 1 for third, nothing for fourth. In team competition, a classic match runs over 15 heats with seven riders per side, each of them out four to five times during the evening. The result: a full meeting fits into two hours, with a race every five minutes. Far from the endurance marathons like the Le Mans 24 Hours, speedway sells intensity by the litre.

---

The art of the slide on the cinders

The track is an oval of 260 to 425 metres, at least 10 metres wide on the straights and 14 metres in the turns. Its surface, which the French have historically called cendrée, is today made up of shale, granite or crushed brick of which no grain may exceed 7 millimetres. That loose layer is watered and harrowed between heats: a deliberately unstable surface, made to be torn up.

With no brakes and no gearbox, the rider has only one weapon: the slide. On turn-in he deliberately unbalances the machine, opens the throttle and lets the rear wheel break away, his left foot shod in a steel shoe skimming the cinders like a third point of support. The bike then travels crabwise, on opposite lock, throwing a curtain of shale into the faces of his pursuers. It is the same vocabulary of movement as American flat track, pushed to the extreme by the total absence of braking — a world that has nothing left in common with the way you take a corner on the road.

---

From Wembley 1936 to the Speedway Grand Prix

The first individual world championship was staged on 10 September 1936, at WembleyStadium, in front of 74,000 people. At the end of the twenty heats of the final, bonus points from the qualifying rounds included, the Australian Lionel Van Praag and the Englishman Eric Langton were dead level on 26 points. A run-off was needed to separate them. Langton broke the tape at the start, which should have disqualified him: Van Praag refused to win on a technicality and demanded that the race be started again. Langton led until the last corner, where Van Praag slipped through a mouse hole of a gap and took it by less than a wheel. Cruelty of the scoring system: Bluey Wilkinson finished third with 25 points even though he had not been beaten once in the final — his qualifying bonuses were simply too thin. Rarely has a sport given itself such a theatrical birth certificate.

For six decades, the title was decided in a single final, one evening on which everything could swing. In 1995, the sport moved to a series format: the Speedway Grand Prix, several rounds spread across the season, won at its very first edition by the Dane Hans Nielsen — his fourth world title. The principle has stayed the same: sixteen riders per Grand Prix, twenty heats in which each of them meets all the others once, the best eight going into the semi-finals, the top two from each semi into the final. Maximum score over a weekend: 21 points, that is five heats won, the semi and the final.

Three men share the outright record of six world crowns : the New Zealander Ivan Mauger, the Swede Tony Rickardsson and the Pole Bartosz Zmarzlik, who joined them on 13 September 2025 at Vojens, in Denmark. Zmarzlik even became the first rider in history to string together four consecutive titles, and he did it the hard way: a single point clear of the Australian Brady Kurtz, who was contesting his first full Grand Prix season and had just reeled off five wins in a row, a record taken off Rickardsson's four in 2005. Nothing anecdotal about it: at that level of density, speedway stands comparison with the finest scraps in MotoGP history.

---

The great speedway nations

Born in Australia, made popular in Great Britain, the discipline has gradually shifted its epicentre eastwards. The Polish national championship, theEkstraliga, is today regarded as the richest and best-followed league in the world : in 2025 it ran at around 9,600 spectators per match on average, with clubs like Betard Sparta Wrocław (13,675 on average, sold out all season long) and Toruń (13,029). It is quite simply the most-followed sport in Poland after football. Alongside it, Denmark and Sweden line up whole generations of champions, andAustralia keeps on exporting riders cut out for the slide — a talent pool that also gave tarmac names like Mick Doohan and Casey Stoner.

On the nations-competition side, the Speedway of Nations was created in 2018, on a pairs format: seven national teams per meeting, two riders each, whose scores are added together. Russia swept the first three editions (2018, 2019, 2020), Great Britain won in 2021 and 2024, Australia in 2022 and 2025 — the event not having been held in 2023.

---

Ice, grass and long track

The principle of the brakeless oval has been adapted to other surfaces. Ice speedway keeps the 260 to 425-metre oval, but the bikes gain a two-speed gearbox, a longer wheelbase and a stiffer frame — and above all tyres bristling with 3 cm spikes : between 130 and 140 studs at the front, 170 to 190 at the rear. These machines still have no brakes and touch 130 km/h in a straight line, leaned over to the extreme, shoulder a few centimetres from the ice. The individual world championship has existed since 1966, and Soviet then Russian domination of it is historic.

On dirt and on grass, grasstrack and long track play the same tune on far longer ovals, where top speeds go through the roof. The long track world championship was created in 1971, following on from the European championship contested from 1957 to 1970. The German Gerd Riss holds the record there with eight titles, ahead of Britain's Simon Wigg and his five crowns. A family of dirt-bound disciplines that shares its DNA with the Motocross des Nations and, for the raw spectacle side of things, with fairground attractions like the Wall of Death.

🛠️ Speedway is a cult of bare mechanics, with no fairing and no frills: our vintage and retro motorcycle accessories speak exactly the same language.

---

Summary table

---

FAQ — Frequently asked questions

• Why do speedway bikes have no brakes at all?
  It is a requirement of the FIM rules, not an oversight. On a narrow oval where four machines slide side by side, hard braking would cause chain-reaction crashes. The rider slows down by shutting the throttle and putting the bike sideways, the rear wheel acting as a natural brake.
• What engine capacity and fuel do the speedway rules require?
  A four-stroke single of 500 cm³ maximum, fed on pure methanol with no additives. Methanol allows a very high compression ratio, which makes it possible to get around 75 horsepower out of a machine weighing at least 77 kg.
• How does a speedway heat work?
  Four riders set off from a standing start behind an elastic tape, running anticlockwise, over four laps of the oval, which is around sixty seconds. The winner scores 3 points, the second 2, the third 1 and the fourth none.
• When was the Speedway Grand Prix created?
  In 1995. It replaced the single final that had crowned the world champion since 1936, in favour of a series of rounds spread across the season. The Dane Hans Nielsen won that first edition, his fourth world title.
• Who holds the record for world titles in speedway?
  Three riders are on six crowns: the New Zealander Ivan Mauger, the Swede Tony Rickardsson and the Pole Bartosz Zmarzlik, crowned for the sixth time on 13 September 2025 at Vojens. Zmarzlik is the first to have strung together four consecutive titles.

↑ Back to top