The long track to potential World Championship glory has become more clearly mapped out for Kent SLYDE Kings’ young starlet James Shanes this week: with details of the FIM World Longtrack Championships at both individual and team level announced.

Having had a dramatic rise to prominence in his first year on the senior World Championship stage last season, the Dorset-based teenager – who has been confirmed in the Sittingbourne-based Speedway club’s team for 2016 – will find himself very much the man to beat when the qualifying rounds for the World Longtrack Championship which is run on a five round ‘Grand Prix’ basis get underway in June.

The World Long track event which has been running since 1957 and was won by Kentish motorcycling legend, Don Godden back in 1969 is contested on large 1000 metre sand-based tracks in Continental Europe in the main and has a rich history in terms of English success with Godden, Michael Lee, the late Simon Wigg and current-day Sky TV pundit Kelvin Tatum all having worn the St George’s Cross race jacket to victory.  The last of those wins (by Tatum) was though now was 15 years ago in 2000 and many experts predict that the Kent Kings’ own Boy Wizard of Balance, so at home on the super fast Longtrack machines, is GB’s best hope for eventual gold medal success in the event.

The qualifiers from last year’s GP series (including rostrum man Richard Hall) had their numbers supplemented this week by three ‘Wild Cards’ and some commentators had speculated that Shanes may make that list – but in the end that wasn’t the case.

The ACU’s Track Racing Committee Chairman Peter Gregory explained,

“The Governing Body’s position is basically that young up-and-coming riders like James and the excellent German starlet Michael Haertel should earn their place in the Grand Prix series line-up via the 2016 qualifiers. Instead wildcards are given to riders who’ve already ridden well at this level but who, for some reason – be it injury or something else – have not qualified as of right from the previous years’ series”

On this basis the three Wild Cards have been given this time around to the Finn, Appe Mustonen (a nod to the fact that his home nation stage one of the five GP rounds in 2016), former European champion, the Frenchman Stephane Tresarrieu and the Brit who finished runner up back in 2008, Glen Phillips.  The former Wimbledon Dons rider Phillips hails from Kent – having been born like the Kennett brothers, in Farnborough in the north-west of the county and was (along with Hall) a team-mate of Shanes in the GB side which won the World Team Cup in the discipline earlier this year.

But Gregory is optimistic that the new blood will make its way to join the currently named field in that GP series,

“The way the Wild Cards have been decided is not anything I have a quibble with and I certainly expect the likes of James Shanes and Haertel to qualify.”

Shanes, who will now set out down the road of qualification knowing he has the title of British Masters champion, commented,

“I can fully understand why I wasn’t given one of the scarce ‘Wild Card’ slots and my priority is 100% to concentrate of getting through the qualifiers and taking up a slot in the GP series.”

There are two initial qualifying rounds with Shanes not yet knowing which he’ll be in – these are on June 4^th, in St. Macaire or the following day at Bielefeld in Germany; with those successful at this stage moving forward to the final ‘Challenge’ eliminator round at La Reole back in France.

The five round GP series itself starts on M9idsummers Day at Muhldorf with further rounds in the Netherlands, Finland, France & Germany.

Meanwhile Team GB (with one hopes young James in the side) defend their World Longtrack title in the Czech Republic on July 16^th.

All in all a hectic racing schedule for the SLYDE Kings’ heat-leader Shanes, who at least won’t have far to travel when he looks to go one better than his Silver Medal in the European Grasstrack championship – as that’s being held in Swingfield near Folkestone in his adopted racing county in September.

Picture supplied by Elizabeth Leslie.