Rare Change

Richard Hughes trains him out of Upper Lambourn in Berkshire, a yard that has sent out 65 winners already this season, so this is no small operation. Hughes has spoken openly about Rare Change being a talented but frustrating horse — the kind that shows you something brilliant one day and leaves you scratching your head the next. He ran a fine race at Glorious Goodwood, finishing third in a competitive six-furlong race, and yet turned up sixth at Doncaster shortly after. That inconsistency is the central puzzle with this horse.

Where Rare Change genuinely comes alive is on fast, dry ground. In those conditions he has won 2 of just 4 races — a remarkable 50% record that suggests the state of the track matters enormously to him. His last win came at Pontefract in June 2025, when jockey Hector Crouch described a tense, close finish at a higher level of competition. Crouch noted afterwards that Rare Change had needed to step up — and did. That kind of performance, winning well in a tougher race, is exactly what Hughes had been waiting for. The first career win had come just weeks earlier at Windsor in May, so for a brief spell this summer, things clicked.

Since then, though, he has gone six races without winning. His recent form reads 3-12-12-6-12-7 — a third place to open that sequence, but nothing since. At Class 2 level, the top end of most British racing programmes, he has run six times without a win. That is not a disgrace — those are strong fields — but it does suggest he is currently competing at the very limit of what he can achieve. Finley Marsh, who rides him most regularly, has a 1 from 7 record together, winning roughly 1 in every 7 races as a partnership.

At four years old and still active, having raced just yesterday, Rare Change is a horse in search of the right conditions — literally and figuratively. Catch him on a dry track in the right company, and he could easily turn heads again.