PIRATES star Bjarne Pedersen has admitted he is giving full backing to his fellow Grand Prix participants' tough stance over rider safety in the World Championship.

The Poole RIAS rider was not one of the main spokesmen who forced GP race director Ole Olsen to have a waterlogged track in Prague completely revamped for action earlier this month.

But he has revealed to the Daily Echo that he shared the same concerns as his fellow riders over the poor state of the track.

And he was in total agreement with all of the other 23 riders - including his Pirates team-mate Ryan Sullivan - that hasty remedial work on the circuit would have to be carried out before they would all race in the event.

A three-hour downpour had saturated the Marketa Stadium track before the scheduled start time of the meeting, leading to all 24 riders refusing to race on an unsafe circuit.

After taking a vote in the pits, the riders asked that a blade scrape off the waterlogged surface of the track before they would even consider racing.

Referee Mike Posselwhite spoke with the riders before eventually a blade was produced and the meeting finally got underway two hours late.

Pedersen said: "It was really good that all the riders took the action that they did because we are all fully aware about safety.

"We all understand that it is the World Championship and that everyone wants to win.

"And we are all aware that it is the Grand Prix and that everyone wants to see the racing and the meetings finished.

"But it is good that we look after the safety aspect and not race on bad tracks. All the riders wanted the blade out on the track and we needed to do what was done in Prague.

"Now they (the organisers) are looking after safety. They know the track has to be good because they know the riders won't want to race if it isn't," added Pedersen.

The main spokesmen for the riders in Prague were ex-Pirate and five-times World champion Tony Rickardsson, current World champion Nicki Pedersen, Jason Crump and Leigh Adams.

They galvanised all of the riders together and the likes of Pedersen and Sullivan fully backed them, although neither Poole man was prominent in the discussions shown during Sky Sports' live coverage of the meeting.

Rickardsson, meanwhile, says the riders are threatening not to ride in the Polish GP on Saturday if safety air fences are still in place down both track straights in Wroclaw.

He crashed heavily into the air fence in Prague after he ran out of room down the back straight when racing against Hans Andersen and Tomasz Gollob.

Rickardsson, who fortunately escaped injury, told Speedway Star magazine: "I had brought it up at the pre-meeting briefing, saying 'you've got to take that air fence down on the straights'.

"They said they'd try to fix it, but we said 'no, you have to fix it', otherwise we won't ride in Wroclaw because that's a place where you bounce off the fence even more. We saw two big crashes (in Prague) where it wouldn't have happened without the fence."