Mark Loram won the battle of the big guns to keep Eastbourne's Elite League title bid on track at Arlington Stadium on Saturday night.

The Eagles' No. 1 inflicted the only defeat of the night on fellow Grand Prix star Leigh Adams in the last-heat bonus point decider as the Sussex outfit won an action-packed thriller.

It finished 51-38 as Eagles overturned a 51-39 defeat, their biggest of the season, at Oxford earlier in the year.

That could be the difference between Eastbourne topping the table and racing into the championship play-off final or having to try to qualify via the semi-finals.

Adams had won all his previous five races by some distance and when he went to the tapes for the final race Loram knew another Adams win would snatch the bonus point away from Eastbourne.

Loram, Eagles' most consistent performer all season, and team-mate David Norris got the draw on Adams from the gate.

Adams eventually found a way past Norris on the final lap but by then it was too late. Loram had flown and Eagles were ecstatic.

It was a storming finale to a night of high drama in which Eagles had clawed their way into a position to take all three points from the match but then appeared to throw it away in the penultimate race.

Norris roared into the lead, but the race was halted when Savalas Clouting and Travis McGowan tangled, bringing down Mark Lemon.

When the race was re-run, Lemon and McGowan had clearly forgotten the script. The Oxford pair were out of the traps first, leaving Clouting and Norris chasing shadows, and when Norris fell the whole match had turned on its head.

Eastbourne, from 46-31 with two races left and the bonus point in their pockets, were suddenly only 47-36 ahead and staring down the barrel.

Loram's fourth win of the night, revenge for his only defeat at the hands of Adams in heat ten, and Norris finishing in third place ahead of McGowan, did the trick.

Heat 15 apart, the crucial race was heat 11, which saw Norris and Kelvin Tatum score a 5-0 when both McGowan and Jernej Kolenko fell and were excluded.

In an extraordinary move, Tatum only came into the race at the third attempt as a reserve replacement for Clouting, who had been involved in both the previous aborted efforts to run the race.

First Kolenko clattered the fence, then McGowan lost control while trying to overtake Clouting and was excluded by referee Mick Posselwhite.

Eastbourne: Mark Loram 14, David Norris 11, Stefan Andersson 8, Joe Screen 7, Savalas Clouting 6, Kelvin Tatum 5. Bonus points: Screen 4, Tatum 3, Andersson 1, Clouting 1.

Oxford: Leigh Adams 17, Travis McGowan 10, Mark Lemon 9, Alun Rossiter 1, Jernej Kolenko 1, Davey Watt 0. Bonus points: McGowan 1, Kolenko 1.