Zooks

Both of those wins have come over longer distances — between a mile and six furlongs and two miles — and that is clearly where Zooks is most comfortable. It has won 2 of 21 races at those trips, which represents the best version of this horse. In shorter contests, it simply hasn't found the same form. The first win came at Chelmsford in February 2025, and the second at Ffos Las in Wales in late July — two very different tracks, which at least suggests Zooks isn't a horse that needs everything to go perfectly to deliver on its day.

Trained by Ian Williams, whose yard in Worcestershire has been in strong form this season with 96 winners, Zooks most regularly partners with jockey Billy Loughnane. The pair have raced together eight times and won once — that is roughly a 1-in-8 success rate together, which isn't spectacular but tells you this is the combination the team trusts most. Zooks races almost exclusively at Class 6, the entry level of British racing, and has won 2 of 25 races at that level. That context matters: this isn't a horse chasing big prizes, it's one competing week in, week out at the bread-and-butter end of the sport.

The last six runs have produced a third place as the best result and nothing better since that July win, now ten months ago. Recent form reads 6-7-3-5-8-7, which is a sequence of mid-pack finishes rather than near-misses. With a race just yesterday, Zooks is clearly in a busy campaign — and given the pattern of its career, another win is probably somewhere on the horizon, even if it has a habit of keeping everyone waiting for it.