Grieves completes Newcastle top three.

The Newcastle Diamonds are pleased to announce the return of James Grieves. He's looking forward to a second year with the Diamonds after massive success last year and he's keen to progress even further on Tyneside in 2006.

Grieves was always on the wanted list for the Diamonds 2006 team and re-joined the club after a highly successful session with the management on wednesday. He completes Newcastle's trio of 2006 heat leaders in a deal thaat took shape even quicker than the previous two rapid negotiations with George Stanc and Josef Franc.

Parent club Wolverhapton gave Newcastle permission to open talks on Wednesday lunchtime and within a few hours, they had agreed terms for his second season at Brough Park. He comes in as the top rated rider on 8.36 which leaves a total of 9.25 for the remaining two places in the main body of the team.

James said: "It's been such a great and enjoyable first year for me at Newcastle that I didn't want to go anywhere else and that's why I was just as keen as Darryl to agree a new deal.

"The Diamonds have totally revived my career - I've made so many new friends at Brough Park that it would be hard to imagine riding there for a visiting team.

"I knew Pepe wanted to stay here as well and signing George gives us a really powerful top three, especially as we all have different favourites when it comes to away tracks.

"I know they'll both be challenging all season to overtake me at the top of the averages."

Darryl Illingworth added: "It's been a spectacular few days putting together such an exciting trio of heat-leaders and like George and Pepe, James was ready to strike a fair deal while understanding the general effort in the Premier League to keep costs down.

"It would have been entirely understandable if any of them had asked for a night or two to consider our offer but they've all agreed on the day of their negotiations and their enthusiasm means we'll have a superb team spirit straight away.

"We're steadily putting together the rest of the team as well so we hope to announce more names well before Christmas."