Lever Up

The recent form makes for fairly mixed reading. Looking at the last six races — most recent first — the pattern reads 8-3-6-4-4-8, meaning a pair of poor runs either side of a third place, with a couple of mid-table efforts in between. The third place is a reminder that Lever Up can perform, but the two eighth-place finishes bookending that sequence suggest the horse is inconsistent rather than unlucky. There is no clear upward curve to point to here.

Billy Garritty has been in the saddle for five of those races and is yet to find the winner's enclosure with the horse, which between them gives them a joint record of 0 wins from 5 attempts together. That said, the partnership is clearly a regular one, which at least means Garritty knows the horse well. The yard behind Lever Up — the Easterby operation run by Michael and David Easterby at Sheriff Hutton in North Yorkshire — is a busy and productive one, having sent out 55 winners this season. That kind of output from a yard shows they know how to get horses winning, which makes Lever Up something of an outlier among their runners.

The horse raced just yesterday, so it is very much in the thick of an active campaign. With 13 races on the clock and no wins yet, the question is whether the right opportunity is still to come or whether Lever Up is simply one of those horses that runs consistently without ever quite putting it all together on the day that counts.