That means the Ellerslie track was verti-drained on Monday to break up the top surface and let the rain that followed drain straight through it.<\/p>\n
By breaking up the top, it also all but eliminates the risk of the track becoming hard on top, then slippery if it rains.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe take that risk away but it means if the rain continued all the way through after verti-draining, the top would break up a bit more and you would get a genuinely softer surface,\u201d Fulford said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut for it to be walking a Soft 6 this afternoon, I am very confident, if the forecast is right, we will get it back to a Soft 5 by Saturday morning.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe wind is getting up and that is crucial as it dries the track out so quickly and all she will need is a bit of sun and it will be close to perfect.<\/p>\n
Fulford said as long as the region doesn\u2019t get any significant rain on Saturday, \u201cwe could even be looking at an upgrade to a Good 4 before or during the meeting\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut of course rain on the day changes things.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rail returns to the true for the entire 1876m circuit, with Fulford saying it will be back to its natural shape on the home bend.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe sometimes have that rail out to make the bend a bit rounder but we have put it right back to where it was designed to be and that means there will be some new ground on part of that bend.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can find because that makes the bend almost race a bit tighter, some horses will swing wider coming off it into the straight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ellerslie has limited general admission sales available, with all hospitality sold out for the meeting, which hosts an after-party once the $4,590,000 worth of races are decided.<\/p>\n
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald\u2019s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world\u2019s biggest horse racing carnivals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That means the Ellerslie track was verti-drained on Monday to break up the top surface and let the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245952,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[49816,6794,6097,31182,2082,71,143742,2518,106,14568,29116,91125,37113,4380,111,139,69,90544,3512,1881,1973,86009,213,673,28050,810],"class_list":["post-245951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-amazing","tag-baby","tag-down","tag-ellerslies","tag-for","tag-from","tag-fulford","tag-green","tag-head","tag-horse","tag-jason","tag-karaka","tag-looked","tag-millions","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-perfectly","tag-racing","tag-recovery","tag-sets","tag-shook","tag-sports","tag-storm","tag-thursday","tag-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}