King's Lynn Stars want to cook up more success

King’s Lynn co-promoter Robin Brundle is hoping the Stars will cook up future triumphs after reflecting on a successful season – his first joining the club.

He said injuries such as the loss of reserves Lewis Kerr and Michael Palm Toft destabilised the speedway team at a crucial time when Lynn were chasing two trophies which resulted in them falling just short of Premiership silverware.

Brundle said building a team is like baking a cake: “Like other teams we’ve had a few people who have been slightly off form while others have been slightly on form, but we’ve carried each other,” he observed.

“But when we’ve had to take a couple of those riders out of our standard team – for me, that’s what destabilised the balance of it.

“There’s no one thing. Like most sports, there’s a whole lot of ingredients that go into baking the cake. If you’ve got all those ingredients then you’ve got the opportunity to win.

“If you just take one of those things out then you’ve got a different set of racing parameters – and that’s what we’ve been facing.

“Dale (team boss Allitt) has done an amazing job here in managing that situation, as have Robert (Lambert) and Ty (Proctor), our captain and vice-captain. They’ve done a great job all year in keeping the team going.

“We’ve witnessed some fantastic speedway.

“It’s just been amazing: we’ve had close racing, team riding, with rear and front gunners protecting each other, and it has just been a joy to see.

“I can’t tell you have much I’ve enjoyed the season.”

There was a fine margin between success – when Lynn topped the SGB Premiership table in 2018 – and last year when they finished second from bottom.

Brundle added: “It’s like the cake. We were missing the ingredients last year and that’s what we worked on during the winter.

“We documented all of the sports science, and how we go through the routines and warm-up rituals at the start of the evening.

“Our sponsors have given us the nutrition and hydration solutions that we use, and we’re making sure we keep the same mechanics where possible and the same suppliers so we have that consistency of set-up and in that mind-set we want.

“Of course the biggest part of this is what’s going through the head.”

Lynn were at the basement at one midway stage, but as Brundle pointed out: “While we were around the bottom of the table, because of the demise of Rye House – we’d already played them – we were very quietly confident and were three or four matches behind.

“We had the run-in against competitors like Leicester where we knew we were strong and we knew we had a really good run-in to the top of the table.

“The guys have really dug deep. Everyone has injuries at some stage of the season; ours came at the time that wasn’t very helpful for our campaign.

“If you’d said at the start of the season you were going to get the equivalent of two Olympic silver medals in the top flight of any sport, we would probably have taken it. We would have liked gold and were pushing for gold.

“The fans have come back in in their droves and it was great to see three generations, with so many children.”