They came from all over the country. They came from Ipswich, from Stoke, from Mildenhall and from Barrow. Most of all, though, they came from the continent, from Sweden, from Denmark, from the Czech Republic, but most of all from Poland. Welcome, then, to last night’s British Grand Prix of the FIM Individual World Speedway Championship from Cardiff’s Millennium stadium.

What the hardy souls of Lublin, Leszno and Lodz made of the premeeting entertainment – which revolved around various X Factor contestants trampling through karaoke versions of Simply The Best, My Way and Chas & Dave – was unclear, although in-stadium television pictures of wincing Danes with their hands over their ears offered a clue.

No matter. While speedway prevailed in Eastern Europe even before the Iron Curtain started to rust and has always been a Scandinavian staple, the British have always been more stand-offish, even in the 1970s when Peter Collins, John Louis and the gifted but wayward Michael Lee were almost household names.

In 1999, Sky’s coverage helped keep the sport alive, but since then bust has turned to boom and viewing figures have quadrupled. Although the Coventry pair of Chris Harris and Scott Nicholls are the only British rides in the world’s top 15 and thus eligible for the Grand Prix circuit (Wolverhampton’s David Howe was the evening’s sole wildcard), demographics are tilting in speedway’s favour and the sport is about to enjoy the very best of times.

The format is reassuringly simple. There are 20 four-man (each easily identifiable by their helmets), four-lap heats. The winner receives three points, the second two and third one. After each rider has ridden five races, the top eight point winners compete in the semi-finals. The first and second in those race in the final and the points are added to the season’s running totals.

Speedway may not be the occasion for a quiet romantic evening, then, but the bikes start quicker than Formula 1 cars, the thrills are intense and it smells like no other sport – a mixture of fuel, burning rubber, disturbed shale and sheer fear. The riders take corners in a hail of shale, they ride into those corners at 90 degree angles at 60mph, protected only be cycling leathers, and their bravery knows no bounds.

Nicholls and Howe appeared to set the British tone by finishing third and fourth in the first heat. Moments later, though, Harris held off the challenge of the 2006 world champion, Aus-tralia’s Jason Crump, to take the third heat. In the 22-year-old Cornishman, the home crowd had found themselves a hero: the sultan of shale.

On Harris’s shoulders rest the fate of English speedway and in heat eight, when he defied the laws of physics to overtake Nicholls and Slovenia’s Matej Zagar in one glorious move, the stadium rose as one to applaud the David Cameron lookalike known throughout the speedway world as Bomber.

It was, by any sporting yardstick, a magnificent piece of skill, with, lest we forget, serious injury rather than serious humiliation the price of failure.

The only surprise about the evening’s first tumble was that it took 13 heats to happen in a sport which combines high risk with high speed. Inevitably, it involved Harris, who was involved in a torrid tussle with Andreas Jonsson.

As Harris overtook him on the outside, the Swede tipped Harris’s wheel and flew into the safety fence, laid motionless on the shale and then limped to the pits, disqualification from the rerun heat adding insult to what looked like a shoulder injury. Seemingly affected by the crash, Harris was out-thought by Adams and a chance was lost.

Even so, to the home crowd’s delight, Nicholls and Harris made the semi-finals. Hans Andersen’s fairy tale turned grim in the first when he crashed and finished third to Crump and Greg Hancock in the rerun.

Harris started awfully in the second, but was reprieved when Pedersen fell and was disqualified. In the rerun he again started wretchedly, but again another moment of genius took him past Jaroslaw Hampel and into the final.

Mass hysteria took over for the winner-takes-all final. Tape malfunction thwarted the first attempt. Again Harris was slowest away, but at the very final bend of the final and the Grand Prix he nipped past Greg Hancock to take the chequered flag. A star is born.

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