Speedway is a very exciting form of dirt-track racing, where stripped-down motorcycles race round an oval track. A type of dirt-track racing took place during the early years of the twentieth century in North America, but it is widely acknowledged that the present day sport originated in New South Wales, Australia. In 1923, a young New Zealander called Johnny Hoskins was looking for a way to improve the finances of the near-bankrupt West Maitland Agricultural Society when he hit upon the idea of staging motorcycle racing around the trotting track at their shows. This idea proved wildly successful and soon spread throughout the rest of Australia.

The sport very soon arrived in Britain with the first meeting being staged at High Beech, Essex in 1928. As Britain had much larger and more concentrated centres of population than Australia, a greater number of meetings with better prizes could be staged and inevitably it became the most popular destination for the world's top riders.

The motorbikes used for speedway are not remotely like any machine you will ever see on the roads, they are fundamentally very simple in design.. They have acceleration on par with a Formula One racing vehicle,(0-100km per hour in just under 3 seconds!) but rather surprisingly have no brakes, rear suspension, and there is only one fixed gear (modified by changing the rear sprocket) The engines are 500cc single-cylinder four valve, four strokes with air cooling. Methanol is used instead of gasoline to enable them to run at very high compression ratios.

The bikes race anti-clockwise around an oval track on a surface of loosely packed shale. The shale allows the riders to slide their machines sideways into the bends using the rear wheel to scrub-off speed while still providing the drive to power the bike forward and around the bend. Tracks generally range between 260 and 425 metres in length but are often quite narrow. There is also some form of safety barrier between the outer edge of the track and the spectators.

There is a 2 minute rule, where a rider is given 2 minutes to get to the tapes or they are disqualified.

The rider must not touch the tapes with his tire. If this happens they are put back 10 yards from the gate, and they have to start from there at the same time as the other riders.

Helmet colours are used in European racing to identify the gate postion. In Canada, we use numbers for identification purposes.