Four Wheel Drive to Take Spin at Turfway Park
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Photo: Rick Samuels
Four Wheel Drive trains this fall at Keeneland, where he bypassed a start in the Breeders' Cup Turf Sprint
Update: Four Wheel Drive was scratched from his race the evening of Dec. 19.
"He got away slowly in his last race and after the entry we felt like he needed a gate work to sharpen him up. We wanted to make sure there wasn't any excuses for his comeback," trainer Wesley Ward said in a text.
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Four Wheel Drive, unraced since his first defeat in a May 17 allowance race at Churchill Downs, gets back in gear in a $40,000 allowance optional claimer at Turfway Park Saturday night.
Winner of all three of his earlier starts last year at age 2, including the Breeders' Cup Juvenile Turf Sprint (G2T) at Santa Anita Park, the 3-year-old American Pharoah colt races for the first time on a synthetic surface Dec. 19. He is the 5-2 morning-line favorite under Gerardo Corrales, breaking from post 2 in the seventh race against nine older rivals, all of whom are more experienced.
Ward, who trains Four Wheel Drive for Sam Ross and Mike Hall of Breeze Easy, believes his colt is training far better than in the spring, during which time Ward described his breezes as lackluster.
He then ran that way in his lone appearance this year at Churchill, finishing seventh after compromised by a slow start. He finished more than 10 lengths behind Chimney Rock, whom he had beaten in the Breeders' Cup.
Video: Breeders' Cup Juvenile Turf Sprint (G2T)
"There was nothing physically wrong with the horse. He just wasn't showing that sizzle he had as a 2-year-old when every work was just an eye-opener," Ward said.
The bay has picked up his pace this fall, working five furlongs in 1:00 4/5 at Keeneland Dec. 11. He has been breezing without blinkers and will have them removed for this upcoming start.
"This guy has been cruising right along, working great. Looking forward to getting him back to his old self," said Ward.
Saturday night's race is the longest race of Four Wheel Drive's career at 6 1/2 furlongs, a sixteenth of a mile beyond the six-furlong trip over which he won the Futurity Stakes (G3T) at Belmont Park as in his race preceding the Juvenile Turf Sprint.
The plan is to keep him in sprints, according to Ward, who compares the colt's body type to that of a Quarter Horse used for roping in rodeos.
"He's just all speed, a kinda-short compacted speed horse," he said.
The race also includes three other black-type stakes winners: Secretary At War, Awesome Gent, and grade 3 winner Kingly.
The latter won the La Jolla Handicap (G3T) on turf and the California Derby on Golden Gate Fields' synthetic main track as a 3-year-old while in training with Bob Baffert on the West Coast. The Clearview Stables-owned Tapit colt now races for Hall of Fame trainer Mark Casse and comes off a runner-up finish to dual graded stakes winner Ride a Comet in an allowance optional claiming race on Tapeta at Woodbine Oct. 16.
Bred in Kentucky by Clearsky Farms out of the Dixie Union mare Justwhistledixie, the impeccably bred colt is a full brother to four-time grade 2 stakes winner Mohaymen and this year's Lecomte Stakes (G3) winner Enforceable. A half brother, New Year's Day (by Street Cry), scored in the 2013 Breeders' Cup Juvenile (G1).
Kingly is 3-1 on the morning line with Chris Landeros in the saddle.
Post time for Turfway's seventh race on Saturday is 9:14 p.m. ET.