The Silver Ski Rockets have moved to strengthen their team by replacing reserve Lee Strudwick with Paul Starke. Strudwick had struggled to make the big step up from his National League role with the Kart Raceway Cobras. He had produced a match-winning paid 8 in a guesting role against Sheffield in May, but was unable to reproduce that form after replacing Kurt Shields in the Rye line-up toward the end of last month, since then scoring only 11 paid points across seven fixtures.

19 year old Starke, meanwhile, had surprisingly recently lost his place at Plymouth so that the Devils could accommodate Nicki Glanz. He was a World U-21 competitor last season, and placed 9th in this April’s British U-21 Championship. He will line up in the Rockets’ colours for the first time on this coming weekend’s Northern tour that takes Rye to Edinburgh (July 30th), Berwick (31st) and Glasgow (August 1st).

Rye House promoter Len Silver explained the situation. “Paul Starke is a rider that both team manager John Sampford and myself have been watching over the last two years. We both admire him greatly and we were very surprised to hear that he’d lost his team place at Plymouth. As soon as we did, we got in touch with the Devils to arrange to have his contract as quickly as we could. They agreed to a loan arrangement, and we are over the moon to have such an exciting prospect coming on board with the Rockets. We’re not expecting him too pull up too many trees at the outset, but there is no doubt that he is a great prospect for the future and we intend to give him every assistance we can to help him on the road to success.

“Lee had struggled for points these last few weeks – but not for want of trying. I had a talk with him on Saturday night, and he entirely understood the reasons for being dropped from the team – he had no problem with that – and his attitude was that it was a learning curve for him. He now realises the level of consistency he needs to hold down a berth at Premier League level.”