Quest Wins the Mandarin!

Surrey Quest and pilot James Bowen conjured up one of Surrey Racing’s greatest performances enduring a monumental final stage battle with favourite Atlanta Brave to win the famous 60 year old trophy, what a way to finish 2023!

Quest has been a revelation since his move to Toby Lawes and off the back of his win at Huntingdon the syndicate owners had high hopes of a decent Saturday performance. Having been up with the leaders throughout, Surrey Quest stuck to his task gamely when asked for maximum effort by man-of-the-moment James Bowen, who was striking for the third time on the card.

Although not fluent two from home, the 7-2 chance still had enough in reserve to hold off Kerry Lee’s 11-4 favourite Atlanta Brave by three-quarters of a length and give us owners plenty to dream about moving forward.

The ground didn’t come up as soft as we were worried about and James rode him perfectly to plan as we know he stays and it looks like from this performance he will stay another couple of furlongs.

That is the biggest win for Toby and he would be probably one of the better horses in Toby’s yard. We have to give plenty of credit of Jackie Du Plessis in Cornwall, who looks after horses with niggling issues for us and she found a little issue with Quest and helped put it right – without that we wouldn’t now have the horse we have got. Toby has then taken that further with the training and it has been a team effort from all of them.

We will have to see what the handicapper does and there’s a plenty of exciting options ahead!