EUROPEAN PREVIEW - SGP Warsaw
Great Britain’s three Grand Prix riders are in Warsaw for Saturday’s FIM Speedway GP of Poland at the National Stadium, PGE Narodowy.
The venue has hosted the event since 2015, although it did miss two years due the pandemic before returning to the calendar last year.
The six previous events to be staged at Warsaw have proved successful for Tai Woffinden, who is the only rider to have won twice at the venue, with his victories coming in 2016 and 2018.
Woffinden also reached the semi-finals in 2017 and 2022, and has the opportunity to build on a solid start to his 2023 campaign after picking up 12 points in Croatia, with another of his strongest venues, Prague, to come next.
Robert Lambert heads into the meeting second in the overall standings having finished as runner-up to Bartosz Zmarzlik at Gorican.
His first-ever semi-final appearance came at Warsaw in 2019 when he came into the meeting as a series reserve, but he just missed out on extending his meeting beyond Heat 20 last year.
Dan Bewley will be racing at Warsaw for the second time and will be targeting an improvement on last year, where he came away with just three points.
The other previous winners in this weekend’s field are Fredrik Lindgren, who topped the podium in 2017, Leon Madsen who won in 2019 and Max Fricke who was the shock winner last year.
Incredibly, defending World Champion Bartosz Zmarzlik has never reached a Final in Warsaw, being eliminated in the semi-finals on his previous five appearances.
The GP very much takes centre stage this weekend, in which a break to the regular Polish League programme is scheduled.
However, there are some catch-up meetings taking place in Divisions One and Two, with second tier leaders Zielona Gora hosting Pozan on Friday, whilst Rybnik will look to get off the mark with their first points of the season at home to Gdansk.
In Division Two, Drew Kemp will be looking to keep up his good start to the season when he races for Rawicz at Gniezno on Sunday.
And also on Sunday, five automatic places in the Speedway Euro Championship will be confirmed as the SEC Challenge takes place at Nagyhalasz.
2017 champion Andzejs Lebedevs is included in the line-up, along with former series regulars Michael Jepsen Jensen, Timo Lahti, Kacper Woryna, Dimitri Berge, Martin Smolinski, and Antonio Lindback.