Kimberlite Candy gives strong hint for Grand National
Warwick win follows past champions of Aintree race Two For Gold hands Bailey a lift after Christmas blank
The McCoy Contractors Civil Engineering Classic, Warwick’s most valuable race, has thrown up a couple of Grand National winners in recent years and it would not take a huge stretch of the imagination to see Kimberlite Candy, yesterday’s winner, joining One For Arthur and Auroras Encore in making Aintree’s honours board.
In beating the front-running Captain Chaos by 10 lengths, Tom Lacey’s eightyear-old did two things which the trainer saw as a requirement for Aintree – he put together decent back-toback performances, which he had so far failed to do, and will now be put up enough by the handicapper to comfortably get in the National.
If it comes up soft at Aintree in April, jockey Richie McLernon would have a serious shot at making up for being beaten a nose by Neptune Collonges on Sunnyhillboy in 2012.
Kimberlite Candy finished second to Walk In The Mill in the Becher Chase over the National fences last month and Lacey, who bought him for £40,000 as a three-year-old, said: “He’s a very special horse. Every season he’s won his races and today he backed up a good run at Aintree. He’d never backed up a win and it was a concern. The National is definitely an option now, but it would want to be soft for him.”
McLernon, who is heading for his best season, said: “I let them [the owner, JP McManus, and his team] make the targets. It’s a long way to the National yet.”
Earlier, having jumped to the front along the side of the course, Kim Bailey’s Two For Gold was headed between the last two fences in the McCoy Contractors Novice Chase by Hold The Note, but he rallied again under David
Bass to win by half a length. Bailey has had his horses in terrific form but he conceded this was a much-needed winner after a blank Christmas.
“We thought we had a good thing for Huntingdon yesterday and that was off,” he said. “We’ve blood-tested and scoped most of the yard but the vets can’t get near this horse, so he was about the only one we didn’t do. What do we know? Sometimes you just need a winner for the yard’s sake.
“He’s a real star, this horse, and we thought this was a tough ask. He’s owned by a long-standing syndicate [who owned the Grand National runner, The Rainbow Hunter] but Dermot Clancy, one of its driving forces, died before Christmas, so this is poignant.
“He’s a fantastic jumper – just not that quick. There’s a decent novice chase or handicap in him one day. They’ll want to go to Cheltenham now, but I’m not going to mention it!”
At Kempton, Frodon and Bryony Frost made all the running to win the Unibet Silviniaco Conti Chase by a length and a quarter from Keeper Hill.
Paul Nicholls’s chaser, winning for the first time since he took the Ryanair Chase at Cheltenham last March, first saw off Top Notch, last year’s winner, and then the persistent runner-up. “He was textbook,” Frost said.