THIS year's Top Gun Individual Handicap promises to be the most exciting Top Gun ever.

The line-up includes the very best of the young talent in British speedway today and the absolute cream of the National League.

This annual event has gained in prestige over the years and this year we have been inundated with requests from riders who want to take part.

This has enabled us to select the stars of the future with 17 of the 18 riders in the line-up being 22 years old or younger, leaving Luke Priest as the senior rider at the ripe old age of 24!

If you think the Top Gun is just a fixture filler of below-par racing, then lets just think back to last year. The 2008 Top Gun unveiled a relatively unknown Australian by the name of Darcy Ward – yes that’s the same Darcy Ward who has this year taken the Premier League by storm, finishing runner-up in the recent PLRC at Sheffield, and is the newly-crowned World Under 21 Champion!

And this year we are looking to make the racing even more exciting. We have decided to run the event using the ‘handicap’ formula. Riders winning a heat will start their next heat from a 15 metre handicap, riders finishing second will start from 10 metres back and third from 5 metres back. This means the faster, more experienced riders will be starting from the back and will have to overtake riders starting ahead of them. There will be overtaking on every lap of every race and any rider looking to win the event will have to overtake many riders from behind, not just beat them from the gate.

Sheffield Promoter, Neil Machin said: “This is going to be a fantastic meeting and who will win is anybody’s guess. You can look down the field and perhaps pick out one or two of the more accomplished National League performers but can they win from the back or can those starting from the front hold them off for four laps? The race times might be a second or so slower than the Premier League boys but the racing promises to be just as exciting. And if you look back over the years some of the top riders in the sport have started their rise to fame in the Top Gun.”