Lillistar

Trained by Micky Hammond at his Middleham yard in North Yorkshire — a team that has sent out 24 winners this season alone — Lillistar tends to operate at Class 5 level, which is the bread-and-butter tier of British racing. Curiously, though, the horse has not won a single race at that level across 11 attempts. Its one career win came over a longer trip, and the longer-distance records bears that out: 1 win from 18 races over two miles or more, a 6% win rate that is modest but real, and meaningfully better than its record at shorter trips.

Brian Hughes, one of the sport's most respected northern jockeys, has partnered Lillistar six times without a victory between them. That is not unusual — plenty of horse-and-jockey combinations take time, and Hughes is not the kind of rider you blame for a losing run. The partnership simply has not clicked into a win yet.

What is striking about Lillistar right now is the level of activity. The horse raced just one day ago and is firmly in the middle of a busy spell, with recent form reading two second-place finishes either side of a couple of unplaced runs and a fifth. That current sequence — no wins in the last six races — stretches back seven months to that Wolverhampton breakthrough. Whether another win is coming is hard to say, but Lillistar is clearly still competitive, still placing, and still very much a horse its yard believes in enough to keep running.