Andersen currently lies fifth in the World Championship standings but is within reach of third place going into tonight’s final GP of the year.

And victory tonight would send the Great Dane into one further heat where the winner will take home an additional $120,000.

Tonight’s meeting is one of four GPs included in a Super Prix competition and the quartet of winners go into an additional race after the final in Gelsenkirchen.

Rune Holta won the Swedish Grand Prix, Tomasz Gollob took the honours in the Danish GP and Jason Crump was the victor of the British event at the magnificent Millennium Stadium in Cardiff.

And Andersen hopes it will be him who will be taking on that trio tonight, having shaken off a shoulder injury suffered while riding for Coventry in the Elite League at Belle Vue on Monday.

He was shook up by the crash that saw ruled him out of the rest of the meeting and he then pulled out of the Elite League Riders Championship at Birmingham on Wednesday.

But the Dane – who skippered Panthers to the Elite League title in 2006 – will be back in the saddle tonight.

He won the last GP, the Italian Grand Prix in Lonigo two weeks ago, and has only twice failed to reach the semi-final stage this season.

One of those was in an extraordinary Latvian GP where he finished 13th but was one of six riders on seven points – including Panthers’ Czech charger Lukas Dryml – and that figure had been enough to see Bjarne Pedersen sneak into the last qualifing position for the semis.

Andersen has reached the final in half of the 10 GPs to date this season and will be looking to record his second win of the campaign tonight and then go on for a further $120,000 bonus.

If one of the three previous Super Prix winners takes victory tonight, the fourth place in the additional race will be taken by whoever is highest in the World Championship standings and that would be Nicki Pedersen.

Only Crump can finish higher than Pedersen in the standings and he has already won a Super Prix.

Pedersen should clinch the world title tonight as he is currently 16 points ahead of Crump and, while those two are too far ahead of Andersen, Greg Hancock and Gollob are both within his reach.

But while Andersen – who was fourth in last year’s German GP – has enjoyed a solid campaign, Dryml has struggled at this level.

He made the semi-final in the opener in Slovenia but that is the only time he has made the top eight and on five occasions he has scored three or fewer points.

Championship standings: 1 Nicki Pedersen 161; 2 Jason Crump 145; 3 Greg Hancock 129; 4 Tomasz Gollob 127; 5 Hans Andersen 123; 6 Leigh Adams 110; 7 Andreas Jonsson 88; 8 Rune Holta 73; 9 Scott Nicholls 70; 10 Bjarne Pedersen 66; 11 Fredrik Lindgren 64; 12 Niels-Kristian Iversen 59; 13 Chris Harris 54; 14 Krzysztof Kasprzak 52; 15 Lukas Dryml 39.