The Tony and Maddy Sears trained Yellow Brick has travelled the road south in search of feature race success often enough over the last three years, but the race with most meaning to his connections has always been the Stradbroke Handicap, the state’s signature race in his own backyard in Queensland.
This year, every effort in his training regime and every detail of Yellow Brick’s race scheduling will be designed and implemented with the view of having the son of The Mission primed to be able to go one better than he did in last year’s Stradbroke Handicap in which he finished a mighty second to War Machine in the $3 million Queensland showpiece … beating the likes of Private Eye to the line … when not respected in the betting, starting at odds of $41, in spite of Tony Sears pre-race warning that Yellow Brick would be ‘right in it.’
Travel is still on the agenda though … fitting into that gameplan … and it comes with a slight twist with the Sears camp happy to set the six-year-old for the $775 000 The Archer at Rockhampton on May 3 as a kick-off point to his latest Stradbroke Handicap campaign.
This will be Yellow Brick’s second slot race. He was the winner of the inaugural running of the $750 000 King Of The Mountain slot race at Toowoomba back in December 2022.
“The offer to take up a slot for The Archer didn’t change any of our plans, because I kind of had it in the back of my mind and I did have conversations about the race with people,” explained co-trainer Maddy Sears.
“I had earmarked it as a race he could possibly go into first-up and it works very well.
“There was a race the week before where he would have raced if he didn’t go to Rocky, but, yeah, everything is very much on track for that now and the horse is in great order.”
Yellow Brick was a winner as recently as January 10, when he took out the $1.5 million Magic Millions QTIS Open at the Gold Coast, which brought his number of race victories to nine, from twenty-eight starts, with an impressive $3 470 900 banked in prize money.
