Saturday Track Reports October 10 - Five Metro Meetings

The track is currently a Soft 5 (now Good 4), with the rail back in the True position.

We've had 73.6mm of rain for the last seven days. A big storm there late last week obviously gave us a good bank of moisture for this week, so we haven't applied any irrigation just yet. It looks like Friday is a top of 26, a nice warm day. So I anticipate Friday morning we will be back at a Good 4 and, because of that warm day, we may just have to apply some irrigation.

The forecast for Saturday race day is a top of 20, partly cloudy and a westerly wind at 15 to 25km/h, which is a headwind in the front straight — something to watch out for.

In terms of the track itself, back in the True position, as I said, there's a nice clean pad of grass on the inside, with our last two race meetings being out at 11 and 13 metres. So certainly this half of the track is in really great order.

Track rating: Good 4
Grass coverage: Excellent
Irrigation: 2mm last 24 hours / 2mm last seven days
Rainfall: 0mm last 24 hours / 7mm last seven days
Rail: +6m entire circuit.

Verdict: The track was walking in the Good 4 range on Wednesday and was expected to hold that rating until Friday. Rain and showers forecast into Saturday meant the amount falling would dictate the race-day rating. The track has an excellent cover of grass.

Currently our track is a Good 4 rating as we've gone around this morning.

We've had about 24.3mm of rain. The bulk of that came Saturday and Sunday, which saw us into the Soft range, but this morning it's beautifully into the Good 4 range. On Golden Rose Day, we had our rail in the True position, then we pushed it out to five metres for that Wednesday. We've brought it back into the two-metre position for Hill Stakes Day. There's a beautiful pad of grass there and it's in great condition.

Today we've seen the weather clearing, 23 degrees today. Tomorrow looks like it's going to push up to 27 degrees, mostly fine. And Saturday morning looks like we've got about 2mm of rain very early in the morning, finishing around 9am. After that, clearing conditions with a top temperature of 32 degrees.

With those temperatures climbing back up, we're looking at putting a couple of millimetres of irrigation on the track today, just to push it to that upper level of a Good 4 track.