The future was now at The Meadows on Wednesday night when the best young male sprinters in Victoria were showcased in eight ‘sudden death’ heats of the Group 1 TAB Silver Chief Classic (525m).
Heat honours went to Andrea Dailly’s Zippy Tesla, which clocked his second Best Of Night performance at The Meadows in the space of five nights, when running 29.77sec in the third run-off.
The son of KC And All and Zippy Daph, bred and raced by Dailly Greyhound Farms, continuing their recent success with homebred stock, backed up a flying 29.60sec performance at last weekend’s bumper Phoenix meeting.
Drawn in Box 1, as was the case last Saturday, Zippy Tesla quickly found the front and dictated terms as he raced to his sixth win from 22 starts and third from his past four.
Star husband-and-wife team Correy and Samantha Grenfell were the only trainers to claim multiple heat wins, successful with odds-on favourite Xavien Bale (heat 6) and outsider Tiggerlong Nibel (heat 8), a younger half-brother to their recently-retired superstar Tiggerlong Tonk.
The Grenfells boasted TAB’s ‘All In’ $6 series favourite in Melbourne Cup placegetter Kinson Bale, which was all the rage in heat four, starting $1.90 from the rails alley.
However, Kinson Bale was upstaged by It’s Only Money ($8.40), owned, trained and bred by Michael Vaughan.
It’s Only Money, a son of My Redeemer, continued the excellent start to his career with an emphatic all-the-way 29.97sec display, downing Kinson Bale by 2.7 lengths to notch his sixth win from seven starts, demonstrating significant improvement from a 30.30sec Meadows debut one week earlier.
After the disappointment of Kinson Bale’s defeat, the Grenfell kennel hit back when Xavien Bale, which also started odds-on from Box 1, was a dominant 29.85sec winner of the sixth qualifier.
