GARY LINEKER has a “ready-made replacement” working at the BBC should he decide to leave Match of the Day.

The former England striker, 63, has presented the flagship football show since 1999 when he succeeded Des Lynman.

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His contract comes to an end in the summer and it remains to be seen whether he will extend his stay as the frontman for the programme.

But Liverpool legend Mark Lawrenson, 67, feels the BBC already have a clear No1 candidate to step into Lineker’s shoes should he depart at the end of the season.

Lawrenson spent many years as a Match of the Day pundit alongside Lineker and fellow Reds icon Alan Hansen.

And he believes Mark Chapman, a regular host of Match of the Day 2, is poised to succeed Lineker.

Speaking to Metro courtesy of Free Bets, he said: “I still tune in regularly. It is still a very good programme, full stop.

‘I know there is a lot of speculation over Gary at the moment. Would it surprise me if he left at the end of the season? Possibly no.

“But he has earned the right to make his own decision, there is no doubt there whatever.

“And in Chappers, there is a ready-made replacement if it goes that way. It will be up to Gary.”

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Alongside his stints on Match of the Day 2, Chapman also presents on BBC Radio 5 Live and Sky Sports.

But despite Chapman’s pedigree, Lawrenson insists it will be a tough job should he take the helm on Match of the Day.

He added: “Replacing Gary, it’s a big role for whoever takes it. Before him, Des [Lynam] and Jimmy Hill did it for years and were wonderful but at the end of it all, your time comes. 

“But the good thing for Gary is, I think he will decide. I don’t think the BBC will decide. He will decide if he wants to go. He has earned the right to do so. He’s earned the right to leave.

“He’s in his 60s now, I’m not sure what else he has going on that could possibly be a substitute for Match Of The Day because when you first leave it feels like someone has chopped your arm off.

“But he can do whatever he wants.”

Few racing car designers have enjoyed such long and distinguished careers as Bob Riley. The American, who has died 93, was both prolific and successful in multiple disciplines over the course of more than 60 years at the drawing board.

Riley-designed cars won the Indianapolis 500, the United States Auto Club Champ Car title multiple times and just about everything worth winning in North American endurance racing. Repeatedly! His designs triumphed at the Daytona 24 Hour no fewer than 13 times.

It will be for those successes in sportscar racing that Riley will be best remembered, not just for the sheer number of races and championships won, but because the cars that accrued them carried his name. Riley & Scott took a trio of wins at Daytona in with the MkIII World Sports Car in the second half of the 1990s, while Daytona Prototypes known simply as Rileys took a further 10 in the US endurance classic during the Daytona Prototype era between 2005 and 2015, including eight on the bounce.

The MkIII open-top prototype and the family of Riley DP coupes – the MkXI, the MKXX and MkXXVI – (both spaceframe chassis designed together with son Bill) were serial championship winners. Drivers of the former took a total of eight titles on the original IMSA trail (subsequently known Professional Sportscar Racing), in the United States Racing Racing Championship, the American Le Mans Series and the Grand American Road Racing Series. The line of DPs took the Grand Am crown nine times.

“Just about everything I drove designed by Bob was incredible,” says Wayne Taylor, who won Daytona with both the MkIII and the MkXI, as well as the IMSA and Grand-Am titles with each car. “With a Riley chassis I knew that I was going to be in a position to win races and championships.

“Bob understood what was required for racing on the rough tracks in North America; he understood that you need mechanical grip. His cars were always easy to drive. That was always the big thing about a Riley.

Wayne Taylor, pictured with his team after winning the 2005 Daytona 24 Hours, enjoyed enormous success in Riley cars

Photo by: F. Peirce Williams / Motorsport Images

“He played a massive role in my career going all the way back to the Intrepid GTP I raced at the start of the 1990s. I have a lot to thank him for.”

Riley’s successes in single-seaters came as a hired hand. He started working for US racing legend AJ Foyt for the 1971 season, designing the Coyote with which his employer took third place at Indy that year. An evolution of the car Riley conceived for ’73 would give Foyt his fourth and final victory at the Brickyard in 1977.

By then, Riley had moved over to work for Pat Patrick. He would design a quartet of Wildcats for him, though not before he’d built the first Indycar to bear his name in ’74. There would be another two R&S designs built for the Indy Racing League between 1997 and 2000. Both marques were race winners in their respective series, as was another Coyote, with full ground-effects, built for Foyt in 1981. It sat on the front row at Indy, too.

Many of Riley’s sportscar designed didn’t carry his monicker, either. The Chevrolet-engined Intrepid RM-1, an IMSA race winner in Taylor’s hands in 1991, was an important car the Riley story: it was the first machine father and son designed together and can be considered the roofed forebear of the MkIII. Then there was the first Cadillac Northstar LMP that flew the flag for the General Motors brand at Le Mans in 2000 and again, in a form modified by others, in 2001.

His Ford Mustang GTP – a front-engined prototype that predated the Panoz LMPs of the late 1990s and early 2000s – was a race winner, too. It won first time out in IMSA in 1983, though never again.

Yet Riley was much more than a designer of prototypes and Indycars. His body of work was immense. A string of titles were claimed by his chassis in the Trans-Am silhouette series: 13 drivers claimed overall titles in the Riley-penned tubeframe racers. GT machinery, tubeframe or otherwise, by his hand won North American sportscar titles with Chrysler’s Dodge brand, Oldsmobile and Mazda.

Formula Ford, Super Vee chassis and a Busch Grand National second-tier NASCAR emerged off the Riley drawing board over the years. There was even a Land Speed Record car built for the salt flats of Bonneville.

Foyt took his fourth Indy 500 win in 1977 with Coyote originally devised by Riley

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Riley started out building cars in which to compete himself. The first was a C-Modified Sports Car Club of America contender built in 1959 that followed on from a pair of Triumphs, a TR2 and then a TR3, purchased during a stint in the US Air Force. The tubeframe machine known as a Lynx was powered by a Chevrolet V8 and, he would relate in his autobiography The Art of Race Car Design published in 2015, had more than a hint of of the Jaguar D-type about it.

He began his engineering career working on the Saturn space programme before moving to Ford, which seconded him to Kar Kraft to work on the project that yielded the US manufacturer four straight Le Mans victories in 1966-69. Suspension design was his focus on the Ford MkII and IV. All the while, he was building more Lynx chassis, Vees and FF1600s, in his spare time.

Riley & Scott was established in 1990 with Briton Mark Scott, a former McLaren mechanic who had moved to the USA with Teddy Mayer’s new CART operation set up on his departure from the F1 team. R&S was briefly part of the Reynard Racing Cars empire from 1999, before ownership quickly returned to the Riley family. Riley Technologies was the new name for the company.

A passion for engineering drove Riley to continue designing racing cars into his dotage. Riley never really stopped working: he worked on a new Trans-Am car this decade. Suspension and aerodynamics were his twin specialities: he was experimenting with ground-effect at the same time as that other great innovator, Lotus boss Colin Chapman, in the mid-1970s.

Bob once remarked to this author when already deep into his 80s that he was only working part time these days. In old age, he pointed out, he wasn’t getting to the workshops until until 9:30.

Riley & Scott company he co-founded with Mark Scott in 1990 helped cement Riley’s name in sportscar racing lore

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Hotazhell won the final Group One of the British Flat racing season by the shortest possible distance.

The 11-1 shot, under Shane Foley, landed the Futurity Stakes at Doncaster for Irish trainer Jessica Harrington.

Hotazhell was involved in a pulsating duel with the Aidan O’Brien runner Delacroix, ridden by Ryan Moore, before eventually prevailing by a nose.

“He’s a smashing horse, he’s very tough and loves a battle,” said Harrington, who has recovered after being treated for breast cancer last year.

Hotazhell, a son of the 2018 top European juvenile Too Darn Hot, was a first Flat winner at the racecourse for the dual-purpose trainer, who was praised by winning jockey Foley.

“From a five-furlong two-year-old race to a three-mile novice hurdle at Cheltenham, it doesn’t really matter to her,” said Foley.

Hotazhell is rated around a 16-1 chance for next year’s 2,000 Guineas.

Meanwhile, Irish trainers dominated at Cheltenham’s Showcase meeting over the jumps, landing the first four races.

Henry de Bromhead saddled the first two in the handicap chase as Senior Chief beat The Short Go, with favourite Broadway Boy in third.

Antonelli wowed with his immediate pace on his grand prix weekend debut in Monza, but pushed beyond the limits at the Parabolica and crashed out after five laps.

“It was definitely much better than Monza,” Antonelli said. “I drove much calmer today, I didn’t want to take any risks. I just wanted to do a clean session, just to get some laps, understand the car a bit more and understand the tyres.

“I think overall it was pretty decent. Of course, I could feel I wasn’t on the limit, but just because it was my choice. I just wanted to get a clean session overall. I was able to pick up the pace quite quickly. It was good like this.”

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes F1 W15

Photo by: Dom Romney / Motorsport Images

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Antonelli picked up some floor damage coming from a metal piece of debris, which forced Mercedes to repair the damage before Hamilton returned to the car for Friday afternoon’s FP2. 

“To be honest, I didn’t really see it,” Antonelli commented. “It was a shame because I got quite a bit of floor damage from it. It was quite big damage, so of course it wasn’t ideal. But still, I managed to get a few laps in the bag.”

In FP2 Russell suffered a heavy crash after his car bottomed out over the kerbs in the Esses, which sent his W15 into a dramatic spin into the barriers and prompted a much bigger repair job for the Mercedes team.

“I don’t really know what happened, the car just started bouncing on the ground, and before I had a chance to even catch it, the car was already spinning,” Russell explained after the session.

“A lot of work for the guys tonight again, seems like it’s one thing after another at the moment, but it’s frustrating as in FP1 we were really strong, really fast. Obviously we’ve missed out on laps, FP3 is going to be important, just hope we can get the car fixed.”