Kaaranah

The place to start is Wolverhampton. On that floodlit all-weather track in the West Midlands, Kaaranah has won 2 of his 8 races, and his most recent win came there just four weeks ago in late April. For context, he has raced there eight times and won a quarter of those — compared to a win rate of around 1 in 17 everywhere else. That kind of affinity with a single track is genuinely unusual and suggests something about the surface or the shape of the course just clicks for him. Trainers notice these things, and John Butler's yard — based in Newmarket and currently having a productive season with 34 winners already on the board — clearly knows when to point him in that direction.

Butler has been patient with this horse from the start. Back in September 2022, he spoke openly about how Kaaranah had been knocking on the door without quite getting through it — two seconds, a third, a trip to Galway for the owners, and a promising runner-up finish at Yarmouth that suggested the breakthrough was close. It came eventually at Kempton Park in September 2023, and since then he has found another gear in bursts.

His recent form underlines the point. In his last six races he has won twice, which is a sharp upturn from his overall career numbers. The sequence reads 6-1-1-6-11-8 in reverse order, meaning those two wins are the most recent results — he comes into this moment in form, and he raced just yesterday, so he is very much in the thick of it right now.

Kaaranah mostly competes at Class 5, the lower end of the race ladder, and has won just 1 of 18 races at that level — which sounds underwhelming until you consider he has now found a track where he wins at twice that rate. He is not a horse who will trouble the big occasions, but at Wolverhampton, on his terms, he is a genuine threat.