Tiriac

Trained by Paul Midgley out of Westow in North Yorkshire — a yard that has already sent out 39 winners this season, so this is no small operation — Tiriac has built a career record of 5 wins and 11 places from 36 races. That works out at roughly 1 win in every 7 races overall, which sounds modest until you start looking at the details, and the details are where this horse gets genuinely interesting.

On wet or muddy ground, Tiriac wins 2 from 5 races — that's 40%, or nearly 1 in every 2. On normal ground, it's 2 from 4, which is 50%. Those numbers are exceptional. For context, a horse winning half its races in any conditions is the kind of form that gets people very excited. The problem is Tiriac has clearly shown up on the wrong day plenty of times too, and on fast, dry ground the record falls away sharply. Ground conditions aren't just a minor footnote with this horse — they're almost the whole story.

Newcastle is the other thread worth pulling. Tiriac has won 2 of just 4 races there, making it a genuine course specialist — and its most recent win came at Newcastle as recently as December 2025. Winning half your races at a specific track isn't luck; it suggests something about the layout, the pace of races there, or simply that the horse associates the place with good days. Whatever the reason, Newcastle brings out the best in Tiriac.

In the saddle, Barry McHugh has ridden this horse seven times and won twice — a win rate of roughly 1 in every 3.5 rides together, which is considerably better than Tiriac's overall average and suggests the partnership works. The recent form tells its own story too: two wins from the last six races, with finishes reading 1-3-1 in the most productive stretch. For a horse racing at Class 4 level — solid, competitive racing if not quite the top tier — that kind of purple patch matters. Tiriac raced just one day ago and is very much in the thick of its season right now.