David Mason goes for glory in tonight's Conference League Riders' Championship.

If he wins on his home track at Rye House in front of an anticipated 2,000 crowd, it will be a personal triumph for the comeback kid from Seaford.

Mason was out of the sport for nearly a year after a series of disappointments, but now he is enjoying the best spell of his career since he was rescued from the speedway scrapheap by Len Silver.

Silver, the Rye House promoter and former Eastbourne boss, persuaded Mason to link up with the Hoddesdon team after he had been ditched by several other clubs.

Now the former Arlington junior is one of the top riders in the league and is set to move up a division into the Premier League next season.

Before that, however, he should have a big shout in the individual championship.

Silver said: "David is one of the outstanding riders in the Conference League.

"He has a very professional attitude to everything he does, and I believe he has every chance of succeeding at a higher level."

In fact, Mason is a key man in Silver's plans to take Rye House up a notch.

"We have applied to join the Premier League next year, and David is one of the riders who will be in the side."

Mason, 24, is in his second season with Rye House after three separate spells at Arena Essex, plus times at Sittingbourne, London Lions, Newport and Swindon.

He was still a teenager when he rode in the top flight for the doomed London track at Hackney, and the following year he reached the quarter-finals of the world under-21 championship in Croatia.

"I missed out by one point on a place in the semi-finals. I scored nine points, and I think Scott Nicholls qualified with six points from one of the other rounds. I was really gutted."

After that, things went downhill, and Mason admitted: "Some of it was bad luck. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I felt I was treated badly.

"Len has been brilliant. He is the best person for me to be with, and things have gone really well for me at Rye House. It's the happiest I've been."

Mason topped the Conference League riders' averages last season and is not far off again this year. He has also ridden for England against Australia.

Away from the track, the former Seaford Primary and Lewes Priory schoolboy is a director in the family office cleaning business.

Tonight he is hoping to clean up against 15 championship rivals.

Mason was the top qualifier for the final after scoring 14 points in both his semi-final rounds at Rye House and Mildenhall, and last week, in his last Rye House appearance before the final, he scored a 15-point maximum.

He rates Swindon's Malcolm Holloway as the biggest danger, while other potential winners include the defending champion, Scott Pegler, from Newport, and Rye House team-mate Chris Courage.

"I'm really looking forward to it, but it's going to be a hard meeting to win."