Maybe Simeon just likes the month of October.

The five-year-old altered son of Andover Hall, who won his three-year-old trotting colt Pennsylvania Fair Sire Stakes Championship on October 10 of 2015, came back on Monday to set a new lifetime best of 1:54.1 in the $14,000 claiming handicap trotting feature at The Downs at Mohegan Sun Pocono – eight days shy of the two-year anniversary of his Championship win.

Driver Jim Marohn, Jr. sent the winner of $124,798 to the lead on the first turn, only to see a looped Calipari and a quarter-moving Warrawee Onyx move by him in turn to take over the racetrack. Simeon was pinned in by a struggling first-over horse to mid-turn, but he exploded when Marohn had clearance and tugged on his right line, with Simeon easily picking up the favoured pacesetter Warrawee Onyx by 2-3/4 lengths.

Claimed four starts back, Simeon posted his second victory for his new connections, trainer Toni Freitas and owners Edward Hall and James Hall Jr. He also brought his lifetime win ratio to exactly one-third – he’s won 19 times in 57 career outings.

There are no official records on this sort of occurrence, but Pocono-based trainer John Butenschoen must have set some kind of new Standardbred standard Sunday afternoon when he sent out three stakes winners – within 21 minutes!

The Butenschoen Trifecta started at Harrah’s Philly when Paprike Blue Chip won a division of the Simpson freshman colt pace at 3:49 p.m. Fourteen minutes (and 623 miles west-southwest) afterwards, Dover Dan beat some of the sport’s best three-year-old male trotters in a division of the Bluegrass Stake at Kentucky’s famous Red Mile. And seven minutes after that big win, freshman colt trotter Scirocco Rob took a division of his Simpson stake at Harrah’s.

Total haul for 21 minutes of work for Team Butenschoen -- $71,550, out of the $112,558 the stable won between stakes at the two tracks (11 starters, 3 wins, 2 seconds, a third, and 10 cheque getters). … And all three horses in this “Trifecta” had won earlier in the year at Pocono.

(PHHA/Pocono)