Party Pack

The recent form makes for sobering reading. Looking at the last six runs — finishing 7th, then absent for a spell, then 5th, 8th, another absence, and most recently 12th — there is no obvious upward curve here. The 12th-place finish is the kind of result that suggests the horse is finding things tough at whatever level it is currently racing. It ran just yesterday, so at least enthusiasm is not in short supply from the team around it.

Party Pack is trained by J P Flavin, based in Tramore, County Waterford, a yard that has sent out 10 winners already this season — so the training operation clearly knows how to get horses to win races. That makes Party Pack something of an outlier in the yard rather than a reflection of how Flavin operates. Sometimes a horse simply finds its level, and that level turns out to be one where winning is a very rare event. Whether there is a race out there that suits Party Pack well enough to finally break the duck remains to be seen, but at eight years old, the clock is ticking.