IT'S been a dreadful year for all sports fans with matches cancelled, seasons brought to a premature halt, and fans locked out.
While some sports have soldiered on with no fans the experience for those watching on TV has been much diminished.
Scotland's national motorsport centre, Knockhill, in Fife, has suffered along with everyone else and this year saw 41 events either cancelled, postponed or run behind closed doors. So motorsport fans will be relieved the circuit has hopefully weathered the storm and has announced the provisional events schedule for 2021.
The highlights are the cornerstone events of the Bennetts British Superbikes and Kwik Fit British Touring Cars, televised live, but these are complemented by a host of Scottish car and motorcycle races.
It all began in the early 1970s when farmer Tom Kinnaird dreamed of changing his sheep farm into a race track. Kinnaird’s farm, in the lee of the Knock Hill, had a narrow farm service track and a disused railway line. His vision was to link them to create a demanding road-circuit style track, 1.3 miles (2km) long, with a challenging series of twists, turns, drops and climbs, varying by around 200 feet (60m) from highest to lowest point.
The first motorcycle race took place in 1974 and a host of famous faces have graced the track since including drivers Dario Franchitti and David Coulthard, and TT ace Steve Hislop and Grand Prix motorcyclist Niall Mackenzie.
This year, Scots fans will have a new hero to cheer on – 19-year-old Rory Skinner from Perth, who became the youngest ever winner of the Supersport class this season, who moves up to the headline Superbike class.
C'mon, Rory.
Garry Scott
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here