Among the horses on the Mornington card with more than one career start, none carries a stronger Benchmark Performance Index than Yellowknife’s 82.56, and the three that sit above her have each raced only once.
Yellowknife, a five-year-old mare by Vancouver, lines up in the Sportsbet Race Replays Handicap over 1200 metres against ten rivals. Prepared by Ben, Will and JD Hayes, with Will a former AFL player at the Western Bulldogs and Carlton before he joined his brothers as a licensed trainer for the 2023/24 season according to the VRC, she has four starts on record and every one sits inside her current preparation, so her Benchmark and current-preparation Performance Index land on the same 82.56. Performance Index measures how a horse finishes against its own field. Hers ran 54.55 for a sixth of twelve on debut at Seymour, then a win at Pakenham, then 85.71 and 90.00 for consecutive seconds at Wodonga and Kyneton. The horses above her on the card are Alexander Thegreat, Determined Rose and Fullproof, each with a single career start. Within Race 8 the next-best runner is Pull My Finger at 75.26, 7.30 points back, and that figure rests on ten starts on record rather than four.
Velocity Rating measures raw pace, and hers sat in a narrow band for three starts at 5.65, 5.63 and 5.21 before lifting to 7.25 at Kyneton on 8 October. That is a career high, 2.04 above her previous start, and the highest last-start reading in Race 8, where Sacro Catino is next at 6.30. It also clears the card’s median last-start reading of 4.95, although eight of the 92 runners posted a higher figure. The reading came in her fourth run, on Soft ground over 1203 metres, almost exactly today’s trip. Her win carried a Velocity Rating of 5.63 and her fastest figure produced a second, so pace and finishing outcome have not yet moved together in this preparation, and whether 7.25 marks a new level or a single high reading is the question the campaign has yet to answer.
Her Finishing Differential of +1 is a rounded average of 0.5 across per-run readings of -2, 0, +5 and -1, so it describes one standout run more than a running style. At Wodonga she was seventh at the 800 metre mark and finished second, which accounts for the +5, while at Pakenham and Kyneton she led at the 800 and finished first and second. None of the four runs has a recorded settled position, so every reading uses the 800 metre mark. Today’s distance is familiar, since her win came over 1200 metres at Pakenham and her Kyneton second over 1203. Mornington is new, and her four starts have come on Heavy, Synthetic, Good and Soft surfaces at four different tracks.
Today’s turnaround is 14 days. Her earlier gaps were 36 days into the Pakenham win, 22 into the Wodonga second and 23 into the Kyneton second, so the 27-day average in our table is simply the mean of those three. Fourteen days is the shortest of her career by 8 days and her first genuinely quick back-up, and our data suggests a first quick turnaround generally holds up, with the cost showing on a second one in a row. The trade-off lies in what comes before it. The gap follows the most demanding pace figure of her career, so the shortest recovery arrives after the biggest output, and a tighter fitness cycle is being weighed against the time her system would normally take to absorb that effort.
Four starts in, the profile has moved from a sixth on debut to a win and two seconds, with raw pace lifting only at the latest of them. Today adds a new venue, a fifth start and the shortest turnaround on record, three fresh data points in a preparation that is still young.