The Background

Wainfleet & District Sporting Motorcycle Club started with small club events and assisting the ACU to organise a track racing race event at the British Motorcycle Grand Prix at Donington Park, the club gained experience, knowledge and expertise and ran our first national - The Best pairs.

This was a success and the Lincolnshire Poacher was born - our regular National status meeting.

Most of you here today are probably seasoned race fans, some may have come for the first time, but we are going to take you to the grassroots of the sport by demonstrating there is more to being competitive than by having a 2012 factory race bike. Many successful racers began in a field, an orchard or a closed railway track. There are several who started here and have gained some notable championships. Leon Camier started in grasstrack at the age of six and won his first race in 1992, for the next 5 years he was British Champion. Speedway fans will have watched Chris Harris, another 3 times British Champion, he began in grasstrack. Carl Fogarty was a motocrosser before winning 7 World Championships. Our sport is exciting, it is extremely fast and is very competitive. Unlike those lads over there on the smooth tarmac, we use different bikes, we run them on methanol and we use 1000cc superbike engines in the sidecars.

Grasstrack racing motorcycles look quite similar to Speedway machines but there are different engine capacity limits for each class. In the UK there are classes for 250 cc (normally 2 stroke engines), 350 cc and 500 cc bikes (usually 4-stroke engines). Unlike Speedway bikes which have no gears, Grasstrack bikes usually have a 2 speed gearbox. Both Speedway and Grasstrack bike have no brakes. The only other main difference is that speedway bikes have no rear suspension and are shorter in length, usually by around 10–12 inches. Bikes typically weigh just over 80kg as there is a minimum weight in speedway

The FIM, the World's motorcycle racing authority run a World Longtrack series as well as a World Team Cup. Although both events are named 'Longtrack', they often are competed for on Grass. The World Longtrack series competitors must qualify through a series of Qualifiers. Riders must be selected by their home nations motorcycling authority. Riders then must compete in Qualifying rounds and hotly contested Semi Finals before reaching the World Longtrack series proper. The World Team Cup involves each team consisting of 3 riders racing each other for points. The top team at the end is the winner.

Your typical big superbike will accelerate from 0 to 100mph in a little over 6 seconds, these grass machines are capable of doing 0 to 100mph in half that time, typically 2.8 - 3.0 seconds