Grenfell's Beau Bailey is preparing to take on the best Speedway riders in the world again, when he heads off to Slovenia to compete in the semi finals of the SGP3 Speedway Youth World Championships.
Riding a 250cc motorbike, this is Beau's third time competing in the championship, where he finished in second place overall last year and ninth in the world in his debut in 2023.
For Beau to take part in the grand final in Prague, he will have to finish in the top eight in his heat at the semi finals on May 24.
Beau said his preparations this year have been quite good, with regular training in Forbes at a track built by Angus Maslin.
Throughout the weekends in May, Beau said he was over in Forbes honing his skills, and testing bike configurations.
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This year will be the last year Beau will be racing in the 250cc class, before being able to move into racing on 500cc motorbikes.
Beau has been racing on 250cc bikes for the last three and half years, first racing in the class when he was 13.
Beau said he really confident he will be able to make it to the top of the podium this year particularly based on his experiences from last year,
"We've done a lot of testing since we came back from last year's trip," he said.
"We've been doing a lot of testing, trying different stuff to see if we can make a bigger improvement for this year."
Beau said last year they could have taken a tooth or two off the bike to give it a bit more speed, but they decided against taking that risk as their goal was just to get on the podium, which they did,
For this year's SGP3 championships, Beau and his family have sent off the engines he will be using to Europe, and when he arrives in mid April they will do final checks on the engines and place them in the frames.
Beau said it will take about a week to put the frames together, and then he will have four weeks to train before the semi finals.
The semi finals at Slovenia have two heats of 16 racers competing for the top eight qualifying positions. The top eight racers in each of the heats will then go on to compete in the grand final hosted in Prague.
With at least 20 other racers who went up against Beau in last year's championships, Beau said he is expecting it to be a tough challenge.
