The Steve Wiseman Memorial Free-For-All for filly and mare pacers will be the main event at Cal Expo on Friday night, March 8 with Give Me This Dance and Graceful Horizon headlining the field.
There will be 10 races decided on Friday evening with things getting underway at 6:45 p.m.
There is a $2,200 carryover in the 20-cent Pick 7 with a $7,500 guaranteed gross pool.
Give Me This Dance is a Wind Me Up homebred, who races for Alan and Cheryl Sandbulte with Luke Plano driving and training. She comes into this assignment with 26 wins from her 78 starts, a 1:51 mark set over this track and she’s just over the $300,000 earnings plateau.
Graceful Horizon is trained and driven by Nick Roland while racing for Set The Pace Racing LLC and has 28 wins from 72 career outings with $312,136 in the bank.
Taking on this pair in the $12,500 USD feature are Divine Art, Senga Nightmare, Shirley Skip Shady and What Cheer.
Looking ahead to Sunday’s program, a pair of $20,000 USD California Sire Stakes for the three-year-old pacers will get the marquee treatment. Another Tuff Woman was a romping winner of the first big-money clash for the sophomore fillies and looms large right back, while Celebrity Status was posing for pictures after the initial stakes dance for the three-year-old males.
Bin A Mystery solves stakes puzzle
Last week’s California Sire Stakes clash for the four-year-old pacers turned out to be a thriller, with Bin A Mystery and James Kennedy prevailing in 1:57.4 by a half-length over Dougsmonkeybusines and heavily favoured Polar Storm in the blanket finish.
A four-year-old son of Mystery Chase owned by Mark Anderson, Bin A Mystery had to settle for a well-beaten third in the first stakes clash for this group in February, but was much tighter for this assignment in only his second appearance of the season.
“He definitely needed that first race,” noted Kennedy. “It was the plan all along to just wait for the next stakes and I had a lot of confidence because he was training great and his attitude was super going into the race.
“It worked out perfectly when Polar Storm covered us up down the backstretch and I knew I had a lot of horse coming down the stretch, it was just a matter of keeping him straight. He gave me a real nice finish.”
Last Sunday’s program was contested over a track labelled 'good' due to on and off rain, but Kennedy revealed it wasn’t a concern.
“Some drivers seemed to be over adjusting, but I thought it was a very fair track,” he noted.
Bin A Mystery will get three more chances to add to his trophy case, with the richest prize coming on the closing night card, May 3, with the $50,000 championship on tap.
(With files from Cal Expo)