Savage 83% Super Prix Prize Money Cut Announced

It was only last year that the Speedway Grand Prix ‘organisers’ boasted on their website about the ludicrous concept of the Super Prix events. It was another of those new fangled revolutions that nobody had asked for or could really see the point of, despite hollow protestations that this “finale” would add to the drama of the SGP.

On the modest, self-styled “Number 1 website for League and World Speedway”, the Super Prix already has the stale whiff of the online equivalent of yesterday’s chip wrappers. It boasts, “New for 2008 FIM Speedway Grand Prix Series is the introduction of four Super Prix events offering an additional prize purse of $200,000.” The prize money offered then was allocated as follows:
1st: $120,000
2nd: $40,000
3rd: $25,000
4th: $15,000

Under the headline ‘Not Super’, this week’s Speedway Star reveals, “there will be no Super Prix finale with a big cash pot to conclude the 2009 SGP season”. However the lucky winners of three Super Prix rounds in 2009 – staged in Gothenburg, Copenhagen & Cardiff – will receive “double the normal prize money”. Wowy Zowy!

Let’s just remind ourselves of how pitiful the official F.I.M. Placing Prize money per meeting is for the SGP riders:
1 $11,000
2 $8,200
3 $6,900
4 $6,000
5 $5,250
6 $5,100
7 $4,650
8 $4,500
9 $3,850
10 $3,700
11 $3,650
12 $3,600
13 $3,550
14 $3,500
15 $3,450
16 $3,400
17 $2,100
18 $2,100

So, the SGP organisers have effectively announced an overall cut in prize money of 83.5% (S167,000). Strangely – as at April 2nd 2009 – the news of this savage reduction had yet to be relayed on “Number 1 website for League and World Speedway”. Now, the only way a rider can earn more prize money this season that it was possible to earn for victory in a SGP single race last season is if they win every single GP meeting of the 2009 season.

Hopefully, we’ll soon be able to read a full account of this decision on the SGP website Maybe this could be posted along with news from the long awaited allegedly sub judice investigation into the Gelsenkirchen fiasco. Quite what these savings from the prize fund will now be used for remains a mystery. However, thankfully we are informed, “the idea of a Super Prix bonanza race has not been scrapped”.