July 20th Update
Well, the rain has come this weekend which will be good for the gardens and hopefully take the firm out of the ground description for Surrey Fire who has been entered into two class 4 handicap races on Friday, a 1m 6f handicap at Sandown and a 2 mile at York. The slightly longer and left-handed track means that York is the favoured option, with Oisin Murphy booked to ride, but we’ll look at both options before making a call at declarations on Wednesday. We want to try and get a win and so if both races are ultra-competitive then the backup is Ffos Las early in August.
Surrey Shadow is ready to race again following his injury, but he will want to ground soft and there’s been so little rain in the past few weeks that it will take quite a few days of heavy downpours to reach that stage. Stablemate Surrey Moon is doing well, filling out and starting to look like a nice horse. Because of his growth spurts, Tom has held back the fast work for now, so he’ll continue galloping over a mile both left-handed and right-handed until he starts to level out. We don’t think we will see him on the track until at least September but the updates from Tom are very encouraging.
No new news about Surrey Etoile or Surrey King, October at the earliest before we see them racing which will also be when the NH horses return to the track. Surrey Quest, Surrey Lord, and Sea Presenting have all come back into training after their summer break and are doing easy canters before harder work picks up in August. A date for the owner’s diary, Friday September 5th, the annual Henfold House Open Afternoon, we’ll send more details of that nearer the time.
Obviously, we didn’t buy a horse in this year’s breeze up sales and will now look at the yearling sales which commence next month. When we started Surrey Racing, we bought quality breeze up horses from the Arqana May Breeze up sale. Given inflation over the past few years you would expect prices to rise but in 2005 the same auction managed an average of €21k, and a median of €16k. 10 years later in 2015 (a year before Surrey Racing was founded) Arqana had its record year with an average of €92k and a median of €60k. Fast forward 10 years to this year, the average has jumped (from 2015) by 120% to €203k with the median doubling to €120k. It was a sale that was key to our early success but now one sale that we find very hard to compete at.
Good luck to the Surrey Fire owners if Fire races this week, we are looking forward to going racing again this week so we will hopefully see you in (Surrey or) Yorkshire!
Possible races and events.
July
Friday 25th – Surrey Fire – York or Sandown
August
Tuesday 5th – Surrey Fire – Ffos Las
September
Friday 5th- Toby Lawes Open Afternoon
October
Friday 24th – Surrey King - Newbury