Two established promoters are looking to bring speedway and stock car racing back to Bradford after an absence of 15 years.

Tony Mole, who resurrected the two-wheeled sport at Workington’s Derwent Park in 1999 and more recently Birmingham’s Perry Barr in 2007, has already expressed interest in reopening at Odsal Stadium.

Steve Rees, who successfully ran stock cars and attracted crowds of six to ten thousand during the early 1990s at the Bradford Bulls’ home, has also been keeping an eye on developments.

He is even offering to look at sharing the cost of installing a new circuit with any prospective speedway promoter.

When new Bulls owners Omar Khan and Gerry Sutcliffe held their inaugural fans’ forum, they stressed that more use of the facilities was a prerequisite of making the stadium pay.

Honorary club chairman Sutcliffe admitted: “We’ve said we’d look at anything on the basis that the stadium is only used 13 times a year for Super League matches and we want to maximise the usage.

“Speedway is included in that in addition to any other entertainment, concerts or conferences that the site can house.”

Kidderminster businessman Mole, who has also run speedway at Long Eaton, Belle Vue and Hull, among others, over the past two decades, confirmed his interest.

“I have held preliminary discussions about the return of speedway to Odsal but, at the moment, it’s a case of looking into the feasibility of running the sport at the venue,” he said.

“There are a lot of things to be done and I don’t want to build people’s hopes up at this stage because it is very early days.”

Huddersfield-based Rees, who currently promotes stock car racing at Belle Vue (Manchester), Sheffield, Coventry and Stoke, also warned: “A major issue is that the size of a Super League pitch is defined and unless you can persuade the Super League to make an exception for the pitch size, there is little way either sport could go back there other than as a one-off.

“The pitch is now wider than it was and extends halfway across where the old straights were.”

During previous eras when the stadium hosted speedway and stock cars – the last ending immediately after Bradford Dukes won speedway’s inaugural Elite League title in 1997 – only the rugby pitch corners needed lifting to fully expose the track.

Now Rees said: “You would have to lift maybe a fifth of the entire pitch because you would have to lift turf all the way down the straights as well.

“I could run stock cars on either surface but putting in a shale track would probably not be as costly as redoing the tarmac, so I’d happily go in with the speedway people/ “Bradford needs to be on the speedway map as much as it needs to be part of stock car racing.

“Any speedway promoter has all the same questions to answer that I’ve already got on my evaluation list! But I’d go back (to Odsal) tomorrow if it became possible.”

Sutcliffe offers further encouragement, saying: “Obviously we would have to meet all the requirements of Super League but I think technology has moved on since speedway was last here and there are other ways of dealing with some of the problems now.

“There would have to be discussions between both sports to see if they could become compatible but it’s early days and we are keen to see what is possible.

“There was once a big speedway following here. I used to regularly take my own children along when they were younger and was at the world final in 1985 when the crowd was 40-odd thousand.”