Dakota Power

Trained by Roger Teal at Lambourn — one of the great racing villages in Berkshire, where yards sit cheek by jowl and horses work on the famous gallops before most people are awake — Dakota Power is part of a team that has hit a productive spell this season, sending out 23 winners. The horse itself, now seven years old, first won at Wolverhampton back in October 2021, and has added two more victories since. The most recent came at Ffos Las in Wales on a summer's day in August 2024, which is now twenty months ago — a gap that will not have gone unnoticed by anyone watching closely.

The most interesting thing about Dakota Power is what happens when the rain arrives. On wet or muddy ground, this horse has won 2 of its 6 races — that is a 33% win rate, or roughly 1 in every 3 outings. On a dry, fast track, those numbers evaporate. The ground is not a minor detail for this horse; it is almost the whole story. Find the right conditions and you have a completely different animal.

What makes the record genuinely curious is the class picture. Dakota Power has run 17 times at Class 5 level — the bread-and-butter tier of British racing, where the competition is meant to be more accessible — and has never won there. Not once. All three victories have come elsewhere. That is the kind of quirk that keeps trainers and race-planners awake at night, trying to work out exactly where the key fits the lock.

Recent form shows a horse that has finished third, fifth, fourth, and then drifted back to sixth, seventh, and eighth in the six runs since that last win. Nothing alarming, but nothing electric either. Racing 24 days ago and still active, Dakota Power is clearly being kept ticking over. Whether the right race — and the right weather forecast — is just around the corner is the question worth asking.