3 days ago
- Automotive
- The Herald Scotland
'Cinderella story' at Ashfield has Glasgow Tigers roaring
His legacy is preserved through the twin passions nurtured and pursued by his younger brother with the energy of a man who thinks retirement is something other people do.
Allied Vehicles is the family garage the brothers built into a thriving accessible vehicles and taxi business with 900 employees and an anticipated turnover of £360million this year. Allied Vehicle Tigers is the speedway team defying the sport's fight for relevance in modern Britain.
Between the Second World War and 1985 speedway was a fixture on ITV's World of Sport on a Saturday afternoon. Dickie Davies would introduce meetings from Wembley where crowds of 90,000 watched the Duke of Edinburgh present trophies to the winning teams.
In Glasgow the local team bounced between Hampden, White City, Blantyre and Shawfield before a move to Ashfield peeled away the wrapper and found a golden ticket underneath.
Born and raised in Possil and Arrochar Gerry Facenna responded to an SOS in 2014, clearing the club debts and spending £3million to turn Ashfield into one of the safest, best equipped speedway tracks in the country.
In Poland the sport remains big news, routinely drawing crowds of 40,000 or more. Freelance riders spend their week flitting between the UK, Sweden and Poland's biggest cities to make a living, riding for different teams in each country.
The very best, like five-time world champion Bartosz Zmarzlik and Britain's Robert Lambert, feature in the Speedway Grand Prix, a series of races held annually to decide the World Champion. Staged in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Sweden, Latvia and Denmark, the 2025 British Grand Prix is scheduled for Manchester and if Facenna and his son Peter have their way they'll soon be hosting it in the north of Glasgow in a state of the art 7000 capacity stadium recently recognised as a centre of global sporting excellence by Tripadvisor.
'At the moment the stadium holds 4000,' Gerry tells Herald Sport. 'And we are getting between 1500 and 2000 for meetings.
'One of my ambitions before I pop my clogs is go build a new grandstand and get a Grand Prix.
'With a Grand Prix you attract the best riders in the world. The top riders race in seven or eight countries and they're the best on the planet.
'That's what I would love to do. That and build a wee museum with all the bits and pieces collected over the years.'
Speedway rarely features much in the mainstream media these days. While TNT Sports cover the Grand Prix series and Premiership fixtures, terrestrial broadcasters prefer to spend their money on other sports. Newspapers and websites, meanwhile, focus on football, rugby and golf, ignoring a sport so old school people under 40 have no idea that four motorbikes race four laps around an oval circuit at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour with no brakes. The noise is ear splitting, the smell of methanol is overpowering, the skill and bravery on show is thrilling. Spectators are so close to the bends they spend a minute long heat ducking clear of the grit and shale thrown up by spinning wheels.
'Talk to people about speedway here and they'll ask 'is speedway still going?' says Facenna with a light shake of the head.
'They'll tell you 'my granddad used to go there.' Or, 'I used to go with my dad when I was five and you raced at Blantyre or Shawfield.'
'A lot of clubs in this country have to break even just to survive. But we want to reinvent this club and raise the profile to something more than that.
'We got a director in and made a half hour documentary called 'In the Red' which tells the whole story of our 2019 season, buying the stadium, doing it up and the characters we found here.
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'We put five big billboards on all the motorways showing pictures of the speedway.
'I've been outside Partick Thistle, Ibrox and Parkhead handing out free tickets.
'None of that worked, the only thing that worked was when I said to all the fans, 'we need your help here. For this sport to survive we need you all to bring one person.'
'We just needed them to bring someone along and explain how it works.
'And now we keep seeing lots of new faces. Nothing works better than word of mouth.'
Former Glasgow Warriors rugby star Aaron Collins, son of All Blacks great John, now runs a hospitality business in the city. A larger than life regular who raced stock cars as a kid he describes the club's renaissance under the Facennas as a 'cinderella story.'
Word of mouth also attracted former Motherwell, Partick Thistle and Northern Ireland defender Stephen Craigan into the Tigers' den.
Speaking to Herald Sport during last Friday's gutsy win over Workington Comets Craigan credited former Fir Park and Firhill General Manager Alan Dick – a Tigers promoter – with turning his family into petrol heads.
'My late dad was always into motorsport, my older brother used to ride scrambling bikes.
'So we always had that, if not in our blood, then certainly as one of our interests.
'So Alan brought me along one Sunday and I loved it.
'In the latter years when my dad was still with us he would come over here on a Saturday, we would come here on a Sunday and then he would fly home on the Sunday night.
'We enjoyed it. The speed, the smell, the crowd, the atmosphere.'
As he speaks his 15-year-old daughter Chloe is scribbling the results of the latest heat in to a Tigers programme with a biro.
'Chloe was six or seven when I wanted to go and brought her along with me for the first time.
'At first she was humming and hawing a bit. As she got older she started to understand it and she started to fill in the programme with race results and so on.
'Now she sends me text messages with team movements. It's never football, it's speedway. It's all 'he's left, he's not riding and he's hurt his arm.' She follows them all on Instagram.
'On a Friday afternoon we get home, get changed and come to the speedway. We wouldn't miss it.'
A good team helps. Second behind Poole Pirates in the Cab Direct Championship – the second tier of British speedway – Tigers have an outstanding chance of recapturing a title last won in 2023. At the age of 42 captain and talisman Chris 'Bomber' Harris made his 100th appearance as the team….
In a city obsessed with Celtic and Rangers, he could walk down Buchanan Street on a Saturday afternoon completely unmolested
'I was talking to Partick Thistle about this the other day,' admits Gerry. 'It's a struggle for Thistle to attract people to go there as well sometimes. We were building up the fanbase at the Tigers and then covid came. But in the last two years we see our crowds getting bigger and bigger..'
By 2014 Tigers crowds had dropped as low as a few hundred, the club losing money hand over fist. While they've yet to turn a profit the Facennas never bought the club to line their pockets of build houses on the land. They planned to give something back to a Possil community which, in turn, gave them everything.
'Basically the club was going bust,' Gerry recalls. 'We sponsored them in 2012 and 2013 and when we took customers round there were no toilets. You had to walk over a plank of wood to get over the puddles to enter the stadium. So we stopped taking customers round.
'Eventually they came back for more money and I gave them £7000 with a promise of another £7000 in six months.'
Asking for a look at the accounts Facenna decided to make a more permanent commitment in the name of community engagement.
'We bought the club, did up the stadium and worked with North Glasgow Homes and Glasgow City Council.
'We re-roofed everything. Some of the stands were sinking because there was no drainage and all the water was going underneath.
'There was a whole new track, new fencing, new pits. There was one toilet with no door on it and no light so I said, 'look, we're going to have toilets like the Hilton.'
'We did everything we said we would do and we spent over £3million on that stadium to get it to where it is today.
'This year we have a good team, we have spent a lot of money on the track and we want to try to get the kids off the street and get an academy and a training school going to bring Scottish riders through.'
Projected to make £20million profit this year Allied Vehicles – the Tigers' parent firm - plans to move into Spain, Italy and Australia but remains, at heart, a company rooted in the north of Glasgow. They plough £20,000 a month into local community groups and more money still into a speedway operation bringing pride and purpose back to an area consistently ranked one of the most deprived in Scotland since the closure of the Saracen Foundry in the late 1960s. Allied has filled the void and, sometimes, the rewards come in unexpected ways.
'We received a communication from the president of Trip Advisor saying that we are now in the top 10 per cent in the world for sports attractions,' reports a chuffed Facenna. 'I was over the moon about that, delighted.
'We are not far away from breaking even with the Tigers now.
'There are maybe a hundred kids who come and race the Tiger mascot around the training pitch between heats.
'Those kids are up at the pits before racing to get autographs and a shot on the bikes.
'The future lies with these kids. They are the future of speedway.
'And if it's anything to do with me, speedway in Glasgow has a bright future ahead.'
