Illy's Roo

At three years old, Illy's Roo has already won 4 of his 14 races, which works out at roughly 1 win in every 3.5 outings — a genuinely impressive ratio for a horse at this stage of his career. He has also placed five times, meaning he has given his the yard something to cheer on more than half his appearances. The first of those wins came at Salisbury back in October 2025, and the most recent arrived at York just this week on 10 July 2026 — a track that carries real prestige and where good horses tend to find themselves out of their depth.

That York win is worth pausing on. It came at the end of a run of form that looked bleak on paper — three consecutive seventh places and an eighth before Tuesday's result. Horses who can bounce back like that after a rough patch, especially at a track as competitive as York, are the ones worth keeping an eye on. His recent form line of 1-7-7-7-8-3 essentially reads as: mostly disappointing, then brilliant when everything clicks.

Tutty trains out of Osmotherley in North Yorkshire and has sent out 20 winners already this season, which is a yard clearly in good health. Her thinking with Illy's Roo is straightforward — find seven-furlong races with decent prize money and a field likely to go hard early. She is targeting the bigger events not out of ambition for ambition's sake, but because those tend to attract front-runners who set the kind of frantic pace this horse feeds off. Chester is on the radar despite her reservations about the tight track suiting him, which at least shows she is willing to be flexible.

At Class 5 level he wins 1 in every 4 races, but the door to better opportunities is clearly open. Whether he can repeat his York trick is the question — but the answer might come sooner than the form book suggests.