The Third Star

The wins at Southwell mask a harder truth: outside that track, The Third Star struggles. It has won only once elsewhere from ten attempts, which tells you this is a horse that thrives under very specific conditions. The good news is that it also loves normal ground — the kind of surface you get most days during the British winter. When the ground is normal and the track is Southwell, The Third Star has a 50 per cent win rate across those conditions, winning 3 of 6 races. Add normal ground to any other course, and suddenly you have a different horse altogether.

Owen Burrows's yard at Lambourn is clearly mining this seam. The horse's form over its last six races shows wins two weeks ago and this week sandwiched around a pair of top-3 finishes, a fifth and a seventh. That is the pattern of a horse used strategically — sent to Southwell when conditions suit, tested elsewhere when the trainer fancies a run. At one mile one furlong to one mile two furlongs, where The Third Star has won 2 of 4 races, the strategy makes even more sense. The horse has also raced three times at Class 1 level, the top tier, and has yet to win at that grade, which suggests Southwell's lower-class races are where its talent is best deployed. A 23 per cent win rate across 13 races — winning roughly 1 in every 4 starts — is respectable, but the numbers only work if you keep bringing The Third Star back to where it belongs.