We had a full 9-race card on the PSF track this Thursday. The surface was officially described as slow and the times do seem to bare that out, for all that it is important to keep in mind that a lot of the races were in the lower grades and so we perhaps didn't have the better quality horses who would be capable of running a fast time to test that going description more accurately. Two of the Claiming races actually produced the better time figures, though the Claimer for the older horses was won by the highest rated horse on the card, Bakhchisaray, who is a genuine 40+ performer and has run well in Listed company in the past. I can explain his time figure easily enough and the rating of 97 that he produced, but the winner of the 2-year-old Claimer, Ready King is a bigger puzzle. He was weighted to run a decent time, but his earlier form was very uninspiring and he had barely shown anything in his 4 starts to date. He seemed to relish the switch to the Polytrack and dominated this race from start to finish to run a time below the course average despite making his own running. He was subsequently reclaimed by his connections and it will be interesting to see if he can back up this performance. If we are looking for a clue for the improvement he found, perhaps it comes in his breeding. As a son of US Grade 1 winner More Than Ready, he may well have enjoyed the switch to an artificial surface, in which case he could be an interesting horse on the PSF over the winter months, albeit at a relatively low level.
If I had to add a horse to the tracker from this meeting then it would be the winner of the first 3-year-old handicap, Percussion. One of the angle that I like to follow is to look at the progeny of Siyouni when they run on the all-weather and Andre Fabre's Filly took a huge step forward for the switch from the turf to win this handicap with something in hand. The race was steadily run and she was receiving weight from many of his rivals, so she didn't produce a high rating when winning here, but from a poor position towards the rear, she quickened smartly on the inside and pulled readily clear of a good field in a matter of strides. She ran closing sectionals of 11.36, 10.99 and 11.96 to win by 3-lengths and although she will get a rise in the weights for this, there should be plenty of opportunities for her to go in again as we move into the autumn.
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