July is not normally the time of year for stopwatches to be brought out but blustery conditions amid an unseasonably dry winter resulted in new class records for five of the seven races at Canterbury on Wednesday.
Canterbury presented a good (4) racing surface at the midweek meeting as dry and sunny weather continues to prevail in Sydney this winter.
Class records were broken in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh race while the time for the opening event was just 0.01 seconds outside its class record. The highlight came in the final contest, the Schweppes Handicap (1250m), as Craig Ritchie's Mana ($4 fav) smashed the original class record by more than two seconds.
The Richard Litt-trained Eccellere, the $31 outsider in the Bowermans Office Furniture Handicap (1100m), stopped the clock only one second outside of Deep Field's 2014 track record while Jason Coyle's No Interest got within 0.85 seconds of Reincarnate's 2016 track record when winning the ATC Member For A Day Handicap (1250m).
Below is a list of the new class record times for Canterbury
R3 (1250m) 1:13.08 – class record broken by 0.35 seconds
R4 (1550m) 1:33.74 – class record broken by 0.84 seconds
R5 (1100m) 1:04.04 – class record broken by 0.20 seconds
R6 (1900m) 1:57.10 – class record broken by 0.83 seconds
R7 (1250m) 1:13.81 – class record broken by 2.23 seconds
