Max Mayhem

Two of those three wins have come at Kempton Park, and both were Class 2 races — among the better contests you will find outside the sport's very top tier. Winning one of those is a result. Winning two of them at the same track, with months between them, starts to look like something deliberate. In three visits to Kempton, Max Mayhem has won twice — a 67% record at a single venue is the kind of number that makes trainers keep coming back. Jockey Daniel Muscutt said after the second Kempton win that the team had "pulled up stumps midsummer and waited for this," which tells you everything about how that win was engineered — patience, planning, and picking exactly the right moment.

There is also a preference for wet, muddy ground that is worth noting. In three races on soft or heavy going, Max Mayhem has won twice. That is a 67% win rate on the conditions that casual racegoers tend to dread — the kind of slog that sorts the genuine stayers from the ones who just look good on a sunny afternoon. Most horses with that record on wet ground would have their trainer circling the long-range weather forecast every week.

Now eight years old, Max Mayhem has recently joined trainer George Baker's yard at Epsom Downs — a stable that has sent out 14 winners already this season. Baker has described his new arrival with genuine enthusiasm, noting some encouraging work on the gallops and pointing him towards racing in Bahrain, where the horse won at Meydan as recently as March 2025. The yard paid 28,000 guineas for him on behalf of a syndicate looking for exactly that kind of overseas adventure. Regular partner Benoit De La Sayette has ridden him six times and won once together — 1 from 6, or about 1 in 6 — a modest shared record, though the horse's best days have tended to come when the stars align rather than on schedule. After ten months off the track, the question now is whether those stars are lining up again.