As dusk settled on the Arena-Essex Raceway behind the Lakeside retail park, Andreas Jonsson overtook two opponents in quick succession, one on the outside, one the inside, a supremely difficult manoeuvre that gave him the lead and then victory before a delighted speedway crowd. Standing on a grass verge that surrounds half of the track, I joined in the applause for a win that stretched the Lakeside Hammers’ lead over the Eastbourne Eagles.

The previous ten races in a 15-race event had offered excitement but that was by far the most compelling moment of this Monday evening and the best evidence yet to explain why speedway is quietly enjoying a renaissance barely a decade after it had almost died in this country.

Consider the statistics. A speedway meeting broadcast live on Sky Sports can attract 250,000 viewers, an audience roughly equal to that of live rugby league and cricket and bigger than that of rugby union, all sports that gain much wider coverage in the national press.

Similarly, in the early 1990s only a couple of hundred spectators would turn up to a meeting yet a thousand have made it tonight despite the event being televised, while several thousand regularly attend a big meeting on a more sociable night of the week. More impressively, the British Grand Prix in June, the highlight of the domestic speedway calendar, attracted 45,000 fans to the Millennium Stadium when only 7,000 attended the event eight years ago.

The sport’s popularity has not returned to the peak of the 1970s, when a meeting would regularly attract five-figure attendances, but it is quickly winning back lost fans and I wanted to find out why.

On first sight, the Arena-Essex Raceway is far from inviting. You find it down a narrow side road, park your car in a barely tended field and cross turnstiles that cannot have changed in decades. Inside, it is little better, with one rickety old stand, pits housed in concrete huts and a handful of corporate boxes.

But look beyond the shabby furnishings and you sense a frisson of anticipation in the air. Teams grind their engines, burning methanol creates an intoxicating scent and a relaxed approach to security allows a mixed crowd of men, women and children to mingle with the riders.

The mood is heightened because tonight features two of the strongest sides in the Elite League and could see the Hammers take top spot for the first time in their history. “I used to come with Dad and I’ve been hooked since,” says Laura Hamill, 37, who travelled to the event with her daughter and her boyfriend. “I like other motor cycle sport but here you get to see everything that happens. And it has an edge that other motor sports don’t. I mean, the riders don’t use breaks.”

The ability to race on a bike that is fitted with a 500cc engine and can travel up to 70mph but has no brakes is perhaps the most impressive aspect of the riders' task. Instead they control the bike by using the throttle and by running a steel-rimmed boot along the ground.

In previous years, a ride was made more dangerous by the presence of only a wooden fence around the perimeter of a track to protect competitors in a crash, of which they are many. At the Hammers’ home it has been replaced by a padded “airwall” but the threat of injury persists.

“I’ve had a lot over the years,” Leigh Lanham, 31, a senior member of the Hammers team, said. “The worst was a badly broken leg. But you accept that that is part of being a rider. You always come back because you love the thrill of racing.”

Part of a team of seven, Lanham lined up in the first race of the evening alongside Jonsson who, like many of the sport’s best practitioners, commutes between the professional leagues in Sweden, Poland and Britain, earning – according to one insider’s estimate – an annual salary of about £250,000.

A former world under-21 champion, he took the lead to cheers of encouragement as soon as the starter raised the tape and did not relinquish his advantage, sticking mostly to a tight and fast inside line on the shale surface to leave his opponents trailing in a comet-tail of dirt.

Like each race, it lasted four laps and barely more than a minute. The next race followed soon afterwards, keeping high the emotional register of the crowd but making it difficult for a newcomer to glean the subtleties of the sport in which everything happens at a breathtaking speed.

Lanham helped to explain. “All the time you’re trying to get as close as possible to the rider in front,” he said, in between signing autographs. “You watch the impact of their bike across the surface to see if you can spot a quicker line. One overtaking move can decide a race.”

Lanham had a mixed evening, winning the third race and twice finishing second, while also falling from his bike after an error of judgment. But his team did enough to earn a comfortable victory, celebrated with a round of fireworks and a lap of honour in which the competitors rode in the back of an open truck.

For the Sky commentators, perched high on a small stand, the scene doubtless provided a neat backdrop to their post-meeting analysis and went a little way to further justifying the decision the channel made in the summer to extend their deal to broadcast the sport until 2012.

That, in turn, will please the speedway executives present who know that, for all their sport’s thrill-a-minute quality and modest family-friendly charm, Sky saved British speedway from ruin when the broadcaster returned it to the small screen in 1995.

“Speedway would still be here without Sky,” Cook, the Hammers manager, said. “But it would be a very different sport. The money from Sky enabled us to keep it professional and to pay the wages that the best riders in Europe demand. It meant that you can still see quality speedway in this country.”

What do you think? Is speedway a sport of skill and excitement or is it just a freakish pursuit for speed nuts who like to race without brakes? Let us know in the comment box below.

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