Glasgow Tigers underlined their recent dominance over Edinburgh Monarchs with a narrow win over their arch rivals at Armadale in the SGB Championship.
The league pace-setters won 43-41 in a meeting abandoned after 14 heats because of a lack of medical cover following an injury to Ulrich Ostergaard.
He top scored for the visitors with 11 points and the the result stands.
In-form Josh Pickering was best for the home side with 11 points and Glasgow return to Ashfield with three points.
Monarchs’ team manager Alex Harkess said: “We wish Ulrich a speedy recovery. It was a very frustrating finish to the match because with three heats to go, and the scores level, I thought we had the riders to finish the job, but we made too many mistakes overall, and didn’t get the chance to race Heat 15 in which I felt we would get an advantage.”
The match had also started with a fall when Craig Cook cartwheeled off on the first corner of Heat 1. Monarchs took a 4-2 in the re-run and shared the reserves’ heat behind Justin Sedgmen, though that was the last time during the evening that they held the lead.
Scores swung between Tigers holding a two-point advantage and Monarchs levelling up for the rest of the night. Ricky Wells and Ostergaard won their opening heats, and Ostergaard took a win in his second race also.
Sam Jensen was having a useful first meeting at Armadale and Connor Bailey took points as well while, on the home side, it seemed that Nathan Greaves had returned perhaps too quickly from last week’s injuries.
William Lawson, back on his favoured Armadale engine for the first time for a few weeks, took a remarkable win in Heat 8 with Greaves struggling at the rear, then Josh Pickering took his second race win of the night in Heat 9, but with Kye Thomson finishing at the rear in spite of an apparently decent start.
Monarchs did peg Tigers back in Heat 10 through Masters and Lawson, although Lawson was passed for second place during the heat by Ricky Wells.
Tigers regained the narrow advantage in Heat 11 when Cook got his only win, then we had the race of the night in Heat 12, won by Lawson under tremendous pressure from Wells with Thomson passing Sedgmen.
One of the night’s major moments came in Heat 13 when Sam Masters gated, then made a big mistake on the first corner to drop to the back. Ostergaard won the heat to take his personal score to 11, restoring that two-point lead.
Pickering won Heat 14 comfortably but a race-long effort by Lawson to pass the Tigers’ pair of Nicol and Sedgmen failed by the narrowest of margins.
That brought us to heat 15 in which Masters gated first. Ostergaard moved across very sharply and lost control.
The sides meet again in Glasgow on Sunday with tapes-up at 3pm.
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