Wingstar

The recent form figures make for uncomfortable reading. Over the last six races, the best Wingstar has managed is fourth place — twice — but that brief flash of promise was followed by finishes of eleventh, ninth, fifth, and sixth. The direction of travel has been heading the wrong way, and a run just yesterday means this is very much a live, ongoing story rather than a horse quietly put away for the season.

Jockey George Wood has been given the ride five times and is yet to find the answer, with no wins between them from those outings. That is not necessarily a reflection on Wood — some horses simply have not clicked yet — but it does suggest the combination has not unlocked anything new. Trainer Michael Keady, who operates out of Newmarket in Suffolk, is clearly not short of ability in his yard: sixteen winners sent out this season shows the team knows how to win races. That makes Wingstar something of an outlier in the string, a horse that has so far resisted whatever Keady has tried.

Wingstar typically lines up in Class 6 races — the entry level of British racing, where horses are competing at the lowest rung of the ladder. Even there, with supposedly easier opposition, the scorecard reads zero wins from three attempts. When a horse cannot get off the mark at the most accessible level of the sport, it raises genuine questions about where a first victory might come from. There is always the possibility that the right race on the right day clicks everything into place, and Keady's yard clearly has the knowhow to make it happen. But Wingstar will need to show something considerably more than it has so far to suggest that day is coming soon.