Speedway is back on the Isle of Wight. The passionate new team at Smallbrook are bringing new life to Speedway on the Island, as well as relaunching the stadium as a venue. They want to see the Isle of Wight supporting them, in the stands as well as from a business perspective, as Tom Stroud finds out.
These are thrilling times for Island Speedway fans. In April the tapes rose on a new season for a reborn speedway team, bringing race action back to Smallbrook for the first time since late 2013. The Wightlink Warriors team is the brainchild of directors Barry Bishop and Martin Widman. They’re passionate about speedway but they’re businessmen too.
“I want to have a sustainable business that is self-funding in order to maintain Speedway and other sports here,” Barry says. “The speedway needs a core base of fans with local, national and international sponsorship as well as tourism. Everything is a challenge. If it’s not a challenge it’s too easy and eventually it dies which is what happened here before.”
Barry first visited the Island as a rider, when speedway first came to Smallbrook two decades ago. “That very first season I saw the stadium with 3,000 people in it, week in and week out,” he says. “However, in the last few years, before Martin and I became involved, the place was slowly dying, year by year. When the speedway finally stopped there were less than fifty people coming each week. Everything was falling apart.”
Barry is the owner of My First Skid Speedway School and works in the City of London. He lives near Oxford but he’s committed to making speedway a success on the Island again. His fellow director is Martin Widman who lives in Leicester. Martin has been a speedway fan since he was a boy and his son is a professional speedway rider who joined the Isle of Wight team in September 2013. When the funding ran out, Martin formed the Island Speedway Supporters Group and invited Barry back to the Island for a meeting. Travelling together, their conversation was the beginning of their partnership. The talk continued and a plan was hatched along journeys along the A34.
“I said ‘If we’re going to do it, we should take the bull by the horns’. We looked each other in the eye and said ‘why not’? We both bring new ideas and we complement each other very well,” Barry says.
Martin agrees. “We have a brilliant stadium with the biggest track in the country. We decided we could do it differently and attract a newer kind of audience, with different ideas for promoting Speedway on the Isle of Wight.”
It’s a new start for the team and the venue too. The complex has been redecorated with significant investment in facilities. There’s a lot of support from volunteers, most of whom were from the mainland initially. The Premier Lounge is available for bookings as a separate venue and the team want to see more corporate bookings.
“Everything is restored and rebuilt,” Barry says. “It’s better than when I rode here and it was brand new! I see the speedway as the catalyst for change but we aren’t the council and we can’t do things for free or as cheap as humanly possible. It doesn’t work like that. Things like floodlights are ridiculously expensive and we’ve looked at the true cost of everything that we do, analysing our revenue income to see what actually works for us. Our biggest challenge is promotion because lots of Islanders have never been here before. When we began to approach Island based business about bringing Speedway back, I think one in fifteen people had heard of this place.”
Barry is the chairman of Island Speedway, a holding company which owns the business. The Wight Warriors team leases the track and facilities from the parent company, along with all of the other tenants at the stadium. Barry notes the place had “fallen asleep” two years ago, being used just twice in one year, at 5% of its capacity. That’s now 25% and it’s something he and Martin want to continue to improve.The Wight Warriors are being advertised on radio, in newspapers and magazines and at ferry ports. They’ve joined the Isle of Wight Chamber of Commerce and they have around twenty Island sponsors including Wight Crystal, Goddards brewery and Isle of Wight Biltong.
“Every week our fan base is going up, through social media and advertising,” Barry says. “We have a wonderful facility and we’ve got great ideas to maximise the use of the building, which involves embracing the Island community as well as bringing people across from the mainland. I want this to be a cool place to come for kids, who can play football or ride speedway bikes instead of playing on their Xbox at home and getting fat. I really love this place and I want to bring the community together.”
The emphasis is on “family fuelled fun” and Barry estimates that half of the fans are made up of family groups, compared to a typical 5% elsewhere. He’s committed to making the speedway into a profitable business once again and he’s even looking at moving to the Isle of Wight full time. Barry knows that he needs to connect with Islanders to make the business work.
“We’re very proud of the Isle of Wight but I do think there’s a touch of apathy out there. I’d like businesses to value us because we’re a great advert for the Island and community life. People might think this will always be here but the truth is it won’t be, unless we can maximise the potential here. We have realistically aggressive targets. Right now there’s about 1,500 different people using the complex each week. We want that to be 6,000 within a year. If we can get 700 or a thousand people here each week following the speedway then people will naturally look at the other things that we do here and that’s good for everybody.”
First published in the July 2016 issue of Island Business magazine.
