The three-year-old filly Luana Miss turned in a scintillating performance to take out the $500,000 Listed Placid Ark Stakes at Ascot, bursting through over the final 200m with a burn of acceleration that proved too hot for her rivals to handle.
Trainer Trevor Andrews, who saddled a previous Placid Ark winner in the form of Money Exchange twenty years ago, has managed the daughter of Bivouac to near perfection with the Placid Ark being Luana Miss’s fourth win from only six starts … but the trainer’s heart rate must have almost been breaking the speed limit when the full field of sixteen runners turned for home with Luana Miss seemingly placed in a precarious position.
With a line of runners blocking her path and horses on either side of her restricting her options, Luana Miss still had a little over five lengths to make up with 250m left to run.
Even when jockey Shaun O’Donnell angled the $1.50 favourite to take a split between two runners, it still looked like there might be too much left to do as the two outsiders, Castle Road ($41) and the $61 bolter Country God, were sprintlng hard at the head of affairs.
Good horses find a way to win though and, as it turned out, all Luana Miss needed was clear daylight in front of her to allow her to showcase her talent by charging home in exhilarating fashion to reel in the $61 bolter Country God, who had got the better of Castle Road, with 40m left to run and then sustain the run long enough to ensure that the fast finishing Sherpa Express ($16), who emerged wide on the track coming from a long way back, would do no better than fill second place.
The game Country God finished third.
“It’s a relief. The relief is amazing,” said trainer Trevor Andrews.
“He had horses all around him. He had nowhere to go. Credit to Shaun (O’Donnell), he sort of persevered and forced a run.
“The horses on the outside were full of running, but she has just got an electric turn of foot. No, I’m just relieved.
“You need a lot of luck and good rides and all that … but she is a ripper filly. She just keeps raising the bar.”
Shaun O’Donnell was the man who had to respond when caught up in the thick of the action, and he didn’t have a lot of time in which to make the right call.
“Mate, it was an horrendous race,” said O’Donnell.
“I was all over heels into the straight and I couldn’t go anywhere. I actually clipped heels coming into the straight. Then I just had to wait. Then I saw a window. … we got through … she had to make up at least four lengths, and she did it well.
“She’s pretty dynamic, but it was just a messy run race. Credit to her, she had the ability to get out of it.”
A good rapport between horse and rider can be an invaluable asset when racing in tight quarters and that arguably played its part here as O’Donnell has been in the saddle in every race that Luana Miss has contested.
Luana Miss’s win gave O’Donnell his third winner on the day, having saluted earlier on Jaz Session and Joker’s Grin in the Group 3 Colonel Reeves Stakes.
